Most people who live in Allendale know the neighborhood by its clubhouse. The Country Club of Terre Haute sits at 57 Allendale, has hosted golfers since 1898, and its low white building at the top of the drive is about as visible as history gets in this part of Vigo County. What almost nobody driving those curving, tree-lined streets realizes is that a few hundred yards away, tucked into a hillside and screened by decades of overgrowth, sits the other half of Allendale's story: an 88-acre Spanish Revival villa built by the man whose company designed the Coca-Cola bottle, and a restoration project that has been quietly underway, one weekend at a time, for close to four years now.

The estate is called Rocky Edge. Depending on who you ask, it is a ruin, a landmark, or a job in progress. It is actually all three at once, and understanding why says more about what kind of place Allendale really is than the country club ever could.

A Clubhouse Everyone Can Find

Start with the part of the neighborhood that isn't hidden. The Country Club of Terre Haute has operated continuously since 1898, and the 18-hole, par-71 course that members play today carries the design work of William Diddel, one of the founding members of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. Golf historians credit an earlier layout to Tom Bendelow, with Diddel's 1928 redesign shaping the course into the version that still runs 6,284 yards through the property's rolling terrain today.

That kind of longevity, one club, one address, more than a century of continuous use, is the visible half of Allendale's identity. It's the part that shows up in every casual description of the neighborhood: old, established, quietly wealthy. What the club doesn't explain is why so much of Allendale's actual history has been built to stay out of sight.

The Estate Chapman Root Didn't Want Found

Chapman J. Root ran the Root Glass Company out of Terre Haute, and it was his glassmakers who developed the contoured Coca-Cola bottle in 1916, the design that became one of the most recognized pieces of packaging in the world. Root started building his weekend retreat in Allendale around 1920, on a hillside deliberately positioned to be secluded from the traffic on Highway 41 even as that road grew busier through the decade. He wasn't hiding from Terre Haute. He was hiding from everyone else.

What he built there over the following years wasn't a house so much as a private resort. According to local historical accounts and photographs held in the Indiana Memory digital archive, the property included a glass-enclosed indoor pool house built by New York's Lord & Burnham, the same firm responsible for the New York Botanical Garden's conservatory. There was a working greenhouse and aviary, also built by Lord & Burnham, a gatehouse, a bell tower, and terraced grounds with rock gardens and water features cut into the hillside.

Picture a front yard with a waterfall and reflecting pond stretching across it, the concrete base tiled and then covered entirely in melted green Coca-Cola glass, so that anyone standing at the entrance would know instantly where the money came from.

That glass waterfall no longer exists. Flooding and time took it, and it's unclear whether anyone ever tried to save it. But one visitor who played on the grounds as a child later recalled a small private zoo tucked into the property, including a bear and peacocks wandering land that, at 88 acres, had plenty of room to hide them too.

What Eighty-Eight Acres Actually Held

Pulling together the pieces documented across historical listings and archive records, the estate at its peak included:

• A two-story glass-enclosed pool house with an aquatic-themed pool roughly 20 by 35 feet
• A conservatory and separate greenhouse, both built by Lord & Burnham
• A gatehouse, bell tower, and gazebo marking the entrance and grounds
• A guest house with its own kitchen, bath, bedroom, and living room fireplace
• An outdoor sauna and a small private zoo
• Terraced rock gardens and water features built directly into the hillside

The Root family held the property until it was sold in the 1960s. What happened after that is the less glamorous half of the story, and it's the half that explains why so few Allendale residents ever got to see any of it.

How a Coca-Cola Fortune Ends Up on an Endangered List

Ownership changed hands repeatedly after the Roots sold. Vacancy invited vandals, and vandals did what vandals do. By 2018, the estate had deteriorated enough that Indiana Landmarks named it to that year's 10 Most Endangered list, the organization's annual accounting of Hoosier landmarks in danger of being lost outright. The Terre Haute Tribune-Star's coverage at the time described a property facing foreclosure and a court-mandated sale, with vines overtaking the glass pool house and decorative features stripped by vandals.

One detail from that reporting is worth sitting with. A neighbor quoted by the Tribune-Star noted that the pool addition alone, completed back in 1931, cost $35,000 at the time, which works out to roughly $536,000 in today's dollars. That's not the cost of the whole estate. That's just the pool.

The endangered listing sounds like a death notice, but it usually isn't. Since Indiana Landmarks started the list in 1991, only 21 of the 172 properties named have actually been demolished. A far larger number, 105 of them, have been fully restored or moved out of danger entirely. Rocky Edge landing on that list in 2018 wasn't the end of its story. Statistically, it was closer to the estate's best chance at one.

Closing In On Four Years Of A Ten-Year Job

That chance arrived in the form of Scott Tillman, an architect at Indiana State University who took on the restoration himself. Reporting from the fall of 2022 captured the scale of what he'd signed up for: working the property with just his son, no crew, no deadline pressure, and by his own estimate as much as a decade of work ahead before the estate could be brought back to anything resembling its original condition.

Close to four years have passed since that report. If Tillman's original decade-long timeline holds, the project is now roughly a third of the way through, with completion likely still years off, somewhere in the early 2030s rather than anywhere close to finished.

The same fall, Tillman gave a rare walk-through to the Vigo County Time Travelers Club, a history group run through the Vigo County History Center. It was the first time in decades anyone outside the property's owners had been let in. The group's next stop after Rocky Edge, notably, was the Women's Department Club, a reminder that Terre Haute's quieter historical landmarks tend to travel in a small, tightly connected circuit that most residents never think to join.

Two Histories, One Zip Code

Here's the thing about Allendale that the country club's longevity obscures. This isn't a neighborhood with one long, continuous story. It's a neighborhood built around the instinct to keep wealth either fully on display, the club, the golf course, the address everyone knows, or fully out of sight, an 88-acre estate positioned so its own owner's contemporaries on Highway 41 wouldn't catch a glimpse. Both instincts came from the same era and, in some cases, the same families. Allendale was never just old money. It was old money deciding, property by property, whether to be seen.

That tension is still the neighborhood's actual character, more than a century later. The club still hosts golfers in full view. The estate still sits behind its trees, closer to being saved than it's been in decades, but nowhere near finished, and still mostly unknown to the people living less than a mile from it.

Next time you're on one of Allendale's curving streets, past the club, closer to where the hillside starts, know that the ground under those trees has its own decade-long project happening in near silence, one board and one weekend at a time.

If you're curious about other pieces of Allendale's history, or you're thinking about what your own piece of this neighborhood might be worth in today's market, Andrew Southard knows this ground better than most. Get Your Free Instant Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk.