The Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory, Hendricks County Interim Report gives this building a “Notable” rating. This indicates that the property is above average in historic importance and that further research may reveal it to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The survey classifies the house as an example of vernacular I-house construction: a two-story structure, one room deep and at least two rooms wide, typically with a symmetrical façade and a central entry in a three- or five-bay configuration. Over time, owners often added rear ells or wings to meet demands for additional space, along with porches. [p. xvii]
Quaker Asa Hunt was born in Highland County, Ohio, in 1807. He married Lydia Stephens in 1820 and later lived in Hamilton County and Indianapolis before moving to Plainfield in 1870. Around 1873, Hunt hired Mack Shideler to build this house on the hill.
Asa and Lydia had six children, all of whom were adults by the time their parents moved to Plainfield. There is no evidence the children relocated with them. The family may have remained in Hamilton County, because in 1890 the elder Hunts returned there, moving to Westfield and renting their Plainfield house to Enos Hadley.
After Asa and Lydia’s deaths, the Plainfield property passed to their son Gideon, who also appears to have been living in Hamilton County. He sold it to James Barlow, beginning the property’s 118-year association with the Barlow family.
James Milton Barlow was born in 1845 to a Hendricks County farming family. He grew up in Brown Township and enlisted as a private in the 132nd Indiana Infantry during the Civil War. After mustering out, he worked as a traveling lithograph salesman and later taught school in Brown Township. He also tried auctioneering, butchering, and bookkeeping before ultimately taking up farming.
In 1871 James married Sarah Hornaday. Over the next nineteen years they had eight children. In 1884 the Barlows purchased a farm in the far northwest corner of Guilford Township. When they bought the house on Krewson Street in 1895, it marked the beginning of a particularly busy period for the family. For much of the next decade they followed the annual summer migration to their farm, a practice common among prosperous agricultural families.
Barlow was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1897 and returned in 1899. The Indianapolis Sun reported that because he “aroused the enmity of the Danville faction in Hendricks County,” many predicted the 1899 election would be his last. However, he returned to the General Assembly again—this time as a Senator—serving from 1901 to 1903.
A roll call of James and Sarah Barlow’s children and descendants includes many of Plainfield’s leading citizens. Their daughter Myrtle married Fred Breedlove in 1909. Fred later partnered with Myrtle’s brother Albert in the Spot Cash Store, a Plainfield shopping institution.
Son Albert Barlow married Marie Hollingsworth in 1912. Albert became a state representative and, after his death, Marie became postmaster of the Indiana House of Representatives. They had two children, James T. Barlow and Esther. James T. operated a long-running insurance business and founded Plainfield’s first radio station, WJMK. Esther married Glen Broyles, and the couple lived with their family on the Barlow farm northwest of town.
The youngest of James and Sarah’s children, Mary, attended Indiana Normal School in Terre Haute and taught at the Joppa schools before marrying Charles W. McClain in 1916.
In his later years James M. Barlow focused on farming and worked as a representative for the Van Camp Packing Company. His health began to fail in 1921, and he died in August 1922. In 1926 the house was transferred to Mary, the youngest Barlow child. James’s widow Sarah then moved in with Myrtle and her family, remaining there until her death in 1937.
Mary Barlow was twenty-five when she married Charles Warner McClain. A descendant of one of the earliest settlers in the Avon area, Charles graduated from Purdue University in 1915. Their son Joseph was born in 1917, and their daughter Charlene in 1925.
In 1922 Charles was hired by the State Highway Commission. He was first posted to Bloomington and later transferred to Seymour in 1927. By 1940 the McClains had returned to Plainfield. Although it is not known who lived in the house during their years away, the family resided there once they returned, while Charles continued his work with the State Highway Commission in Indianapolis.
Joseph married Sarah Stanley in 1941, on his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Following his father into engineering, he moved first to Fort Wayne and later to Logansport. In 1946 Charlene married Richard Shumaker.
Charles retired in 1964 and died of heart issues in 1966. A 1976 county history noted that the eighty-six-year-old Mary “continues to live in the . . . home in Plainfield which has been in her family since 1895.” In 1989, a month and a half before her ninety-ninth birthday, Mary Barlow McClain died of congestive heart failure. At the time she was the oldest living member of the Plainfield Christian Church and had just been honored as the oldest living Plainfield High School graduate. One of her last public activities was participating in the Plainfield Sesquicentennial parade.
After Mary’s death, the house became the property of her daughter Charlene and Charlene’s husband, Richard. Like her mother, Charlene married a Purdue engineer. Richard specialized in nuclear engineering, and the couple moved to Ohio for his work with the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. While there, Charlene earned a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and worked as a librarian for both the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and the Cleveland Public Library.
Later, the Shumakers moved to Bloomington, where Richard worked for Indiana University. After retiring in 1990, the couple returned to Plainfield and took up residence in the family home. Richard died at age eighty-five in 2009. When Charlene passed away in 2013, the couple’s son sold the house to Erica Kempf, owner of a local yarn store. After 118 years, the house belonged to a new family. In 2024 the property was acquired by the Town of Plainfield.
Overlooking the apartment complex named for James M. Barlow, the Barlow/McClain House sits in an oasis of greenery within downtown Plainfield. Built of home-fired bricks a century and a half ago, it long sheltered one of the town’s most distinguished families.
