Window Treatment in Original Town and the Higbee Plats and Nearby Sheridan Streets

Local Window Treatment Experience in Original Town and the Higbee Plats

621 unnamed town lots, 768 to 5,656 square feet

There's no developer to name here beyond Egbert Higbee, who laid the plat out in April 1866, and the local carpenter builders who filled it in over the next seventy years. The Monon Railroad arrived in 1882, the town incorporated in 1886, and the 1888 natural gas discovery brought glass factories, canneries and brickworks that paid for most of what stands. That's why a town of 3,205 people has an 1886 opera house block and a 1912 Carnegie library. Sheridan was the second largest town in Hamilton County by 1900, ahead of Carmel and Fishers. The houses that money built are frame vernacular, gable front town houses, American Foursquares and Craftsman bungalows, with 1950s minimal traditional infill dropped onto whatever lots were left over.

The county's parcel record is thinner than it looks. Sheridan's own founding records were destroyed in a 1913 fire, and the Hamilton County layer falls back on 1900 as a default year for 126 undated older parcels inside the corporate limit, so a 1900 date on this plat means old rather than built in 1900. Deeded acreage is recorded as 0.00 on most of these lots with a maximum of 0.45 acres, which is a recording convention for lot and block description and not a measurement. Practically that means we don't quote from records here at all. We walk the house, count the openings, and write the schedule from what's actually on the wall.

Deep casing, weight pockets, and no two openings alike

Count on 14 to 22 openings on a two story frame house of this era, 12 to 18 on a bungalow, and 10 to 14 on the 1950s infill. Those counts are inference from the sourced floor areas rather than a survey, and the spread is the point: 768 to 5,656 square feet on the same plats means window counts vary more inside this one community than across all of Sheridan's modern subdivisions combined. The shapes are a fixed vocabulary. Tall narrow openings with heads set high, door transoms and sidelights, bay windows on the larger houses, and banded groupings under the broad eaves of the bungalows. What you won't find is arched or elliptical transom glass, because that belongs to the 1990s and Sheridan built only 116 units in the whole of 1980 to 1999.

Depth is the constraint that decides most orders on this plat. Applied casing, real wood jambs and weight pockets leave far less clear mounting depth than the drawing suggests, and where an exterior storm panel is still hung the remaining depth shrinks again. A 2 inch louver needs room an 1890s opening on Ohio Street often can't give it. The upside is that the same casing is an excellent outside mount surface, wide and flat and already there. So the default here inverts what we'd do in Maple Run: outside mount on the casing, sized to cover, with the treatment reading as trim rather than fighting for space inside the opening.

What we specify on the original plat

Almost everything we write on the Higbee plats is an outside mount, and almost none of it comes from a catalog size. Custom fabrication runs 2 to 5 weeks, which is the right pace for a house where every opening gets measured on its own. Pricing has to be quoted from national ranges, because no published window treatment pricing exists for Sheridan at all: custom treatments $250 to $2,600 per window, shutters $175 to $800, drapery $300 to $4,000. With 14 to 22 openings on a typical house here, most people phase the work by room rather than doing all of it at once. The Indiana Home Improvement Contract Act (IC 24-5-11) requires a written contract with scope, dates and total price on residential work over $150, and we're insured and insured.

Numbered streets, the Carnegie library and the school campus

People here give directions by numbered street and by how close they are to the library or the school campus, not by a subdivision name, which is the opposite of how Maple Run describes itself. East 2nd through East 6th Streets run one way and South Main, Georgia, Ohio and Adams run the other. The Sheridan Public Library opened in 1912 on Carnegie money, the H.J. Thistlethwaite Building of 1886 carried an opera house and a lodge room upstairs, and the American State Bank building dates to 1914. Biddle Memorial Park and the Sheridan Community Schools campus anchor the rest of it. Sheridan Community Schools is its own corporation, separate from Westfield Washington and Carmel Clay.

What a National Register address on the original plat actually requires

Nothing, on the evidence we have. There's no HOA over the original town lots, and no Sheridan preservation commission holding Certificate of Appropriateness authority was verified. Indiana Landmarks puts it plainly: owners can modify their historic properties as they wish, even if they're listed on the National Register, unless federal or state money is involved. Two of Sheridan's three National Register entries are individual buildings, the George Boxley Cabin listed 15 September 2005 and the Davenport-Bradfield House listed 18 January 1985. One honest caveat belongs here. The town's own website wasn't successfully read during research, so this is an unconfirmed absence rather than a proven one, and we'd confirm with the town before an exterior awning goes up.

Window Treatment Services in Original Town and the Higbee Plats

Every service Sheridan Window Treatments offers across Sheridan is available to Original Town and the Higbee Plats homeowners.

Commercial Coverage Around Sheridan

Original Town and the Higbee Plats is one of several Sheridan communities we serve. We measure and install across Sheridan, Hamilton County, and surrounding areas.

Original Town and the Higbee Plats Window Treatment FAQ

Questions we hear most often from Original Town and the Higbee Plats homeowners.