There were two Indian Rocks. The first was Rube Sands's famous house up at Rex Avenue. The second stood here, at the foot of Monastery Avenue, set deliberately outside the park's boundary line — outside, the one printed account of it says plainly, so the house could keep what the park's houses could not. It was, that account adds, a famous resort for tally-ho parties: the big wagons, the horns, the long pale house at the end of the curving drive with its two storeys of arched porches.
Who built it? The record offers three answers and stands behind none of them. One library history gives it to Reuben himself, opened in the early 1870s after the park bought his first house. The valley's own history gives it to his widow Catharine, built after the first house closed in 1887. A third caption dates it 1870, before either story can start. Reuben died in August 1884, which clears him out of any building done after that year. Catharine's own trail is thinner still: one directory year, 1887, a hotel at Chestnut Hill — and by 1893 she is gone from the books. No record yet found puts a Sands hotel on this avenue at any date whatsoever.
The keepers the paper does name are other people. In October 1892 the proprietress here was Mrs. Barbara Tresch, and she was expanding: a twelve-room annex with a banquet hall. The builders' paper calls it two storeys; the permit it printed a fortnight later says three, thirty-seven by fifty-three feet. Both are in the file. Charles Weingartner kept the house in 1894. On 26 June 1901 the property changed hands — Tresch to Katharine Lowa, twenty-six thousand five hundred dollars — and the Lowas were still keeping it past 1911.
For the end there is no document at all, only a subtraction. The park's own guidebook of 1915 directs travellers to the spring on Monastery Avenue, "opposite Indian Rock Hotel." The same guidebook in 1917 directs them to the spring, and the hotel is not in the sentence. Between those two printings the house steps out of the record. That the park's 1916 enlargement took it is the natural reading. It is still only a reading; no taking file, no deed of surrender, no newspaper line has been found.
What is left is a stone wall in the hillside, a spring across the drive, and a file of papers that do not agree. This chamber does not tell you a story about the second Indian Rock. It lays the evidence on the table, and lets the house stay argued.
