Building has quite a history

The building that now houses Interiors Joan and Associates has an extensive history.

Joseph D. McDonald built the house at 310 E. Military Ave. in 1888 for $31,000.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building is said to be a great example of Queen Anne architectural style. It has three floors and 29 rooms. The structure also has many original architectural elements including stained glass windows, wood beams in a lattice design on the ceilings, wood floors, intricate trim detailing and a grand staircase, said Lindi Janulewicz, marketing director for the design firm.

The Canadian-born McDonald was a prominent railroad contractor and banker. Only 20 when he came to the United States, he later moved to Nebraska in 1886. That year, the firm of Miller and McDonald built the railroad line from Fremont to Lincoln, and part of the Scribner branch.

Two years afterward, McDonald was part of a firm responsible for constructing several railroad lines in Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado. He organized the Fremont Manufacturing Company and was a director of Fremont National Bank.

In 1896, McDonald committed suicide in the northwest room in the garret of the house. The Fremont Weekly Herald reported McDonald had persuaded a number of friends to go in with him on purchasing mining stock and blamed himself when the venture lost several thousand dollars.

H. Blumenthal bought the house, later selling it to Dr. R.H. Rhoden in 1906. The home later became the Kirby Hospital. Eventually it was the site of Memorial Hospital of Dodge County, which it remained up until the 1940s, said owner Joan Sorensen Ronin, who was born on the third floor. Throughout the years, the structure has housed a dance studio and different funeral homes.

It was Draffel Funeral Home. Then in the late 1940s, Walt Smith bought the building and leased it to Van Lawson for a funeral home, said Bill Dugan of Fremont.

In 1951, Bob Lattin and Dugan’s father bought the building and started Lattin-Dugan Funeral Home. It later became Lattin-Dugan-Chambers Funeral Home.

Dugan said the funeral home directors put wrought iron railings on the balconies, replaced the wooden canopy with a metal one and changed a number of the trees and shrubs. At one time, there was a stone wall around the sidewalk.

Dugan also said an ambulance would be parked in a garage attached to the building. Workers could come in through the garage and enter the building through a rope-pulled elevator. The second floor was Bob Lattin’s apartment for awhile.

He has other memories of the building as well.

“Everybody thought it was haunted,” he said. “It was a place where my father worked. It seemed massive to me at that age.”

The younger Dugan bought the business from Bob Lattin and Art Chambers. In 1974, Sorensen Ronin purchased the building upon completion of Dugan Funeral Chapel on Lincoln Avenue.

“It’s a very classic, stately building,” Dugan said. “It was very fitting for a funeral home in its day.”