Main Street has been stripped of the glory of the late 1800s -- many beautiful, even stately, houses were once on this street and the few remaining have been adapted to other uses -- funeral homes, offices, university housing or administration. But in the day Main Street must have seen the arrival of gracious carriages, fast gigs and hired hacks delivering be-hatted men and gloved ladies visiting their dear friends for teas and dinners.
Mary E. Carmichael came from Kentucky with her parents, John R. and Charlotte Smith, in 1852 and lived in Bloomington for 87 years. She attended the Bloomington schools and then majored in music at Dr. Conover's Seminary and Major's College. Her father was a merchant noted as a boot and shoe merchant in his obituary and a grocer in the 1870 census. When he died in 1886, the family lived on Madison Street and his funeral was held from that location.
She was married twice, and widowed twice. Her first husband, Lee Homer McLean, lived just one year after they were married in 1868 but her second husband, Duncan C. Carmichael, lived five years after their marriage. She had just one child -- Lotta McLean, born in 1869. Duncan Carmichael was the "well known mail agent" according to the Pantagraph when "Mollie" McLean and he were married on May 30, 1878. When he died in 1883 the couple was living in a house at the intersection of Grove and West Street.
Mary died at her home at 910 N. Main and her funeral was held from that address on November 25, 1939. Her daughter "Lotta" McLean or Mrs. Charles T. Stevenson was her only child, who would later become the grandmother of none other than McLean Stevenson, the television actor.
Charlotte Smith and Mary E. Carmichael lived at 910 N. Main Street from 1893 until their deaths in 1916 and 1939. The home at this address in the Sanborn insurance map of 1886 is not the same house. Who built the home at 910 North Main? Did two widowed women, living on the residue of their husbands' estates build this lovely house?