Paradise Lost: How one of Bloomington's most unique properties ended up at auction

BLOOMINGTON — It must seem like a lifetime ago, the years spent behind the ornate oaken door into the mysterious beneath-the-ground stone mansion Tom and Kathy Canada built as their refuge from the world.

For decades, the two were known around Bloomington for their activism, philanthropy and business ventures. Katherine Noyes Canada is a great-granddaughter of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and had inherited money from his estate. She spent a lot to benefit others.

Today, it appears the great wealth the Canadas once knew is gone. Their unique million-dollar home at the end of a hand-laid stone lane is abandoned, overgrown and scheduled to be auctioned at a sheriff's sale this week. It is a remnant of days gone by.

A 10th-century Irish prayer is engraved in stone at the entryway.

The house now, and then

More than two decades after it was built, the cavelike entrance into the Canadas' dream home is littered with debris.

Strewn on the stone paths outside the house are rain-soaked books — Folk Medicine; Native American: A Story; a Bible, bound in black leather.

Soggy piles of Delano Development Corp. canceled checks, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, litter the driveway, along with a videotape, "The Joyful Path of Good Fortune I," and cassette tapes, "The Key to Personal Power" and "Tibetan Sacred Temple Music." A drenched World Atlas.

Looking into the house from a first-level wall of windows in back, a deep swimming pool is visible, dirty and empty. Filth covers Italian tile floors; thick plaster walls are bare.

A nearby pond surrounded by stone is stagnant, its fountains no longer flowing and its waterfall gone. The formal gardens, designed and overseen by the late Kenneth Yashuda, who was a professor of East Asian languages and culture at Indiana University, are overgrown. An arbor at the garden entrance, shattered.

The house and grounds stand in stark contrast to the 1980s and 1990s when the Canada gardens were featured on public gardening tours, as recently as 1997. They also hosted several fundraising events for the John Waldron Arts Center in the 8,600-square-foot abode. Among them was a 1990 Mother's Day garden party and English high tea. The year before, at a $50-per-person arts center benefit at the Canada's home, a dressing gown that had belonged to Hoagy Carmichael was auctioned for $2,152.

Sherry Sammis, a friend, recalls spending the August 1987 harmonic convergence in a gothic three-story limestone tower on the grounds, built from stone salvaged from a Bedford train station. She first saw the house a year after it was built.

"To me, it was the most beautiful house I ever saw in my life," she said.

Bloomington architect John Byers called it one of the most unusual and interesting houses he ever designed. "There's a mystique about the house," he said.

The Canadas wanted an energy-efficient house and chose earth sheltering — building the two-story house into the earth. Six feet of dirt, planted with grass, make up the roof.

The house shell is concrete, the outer walls 12 inches thick. A thermal envelope circulates air between the concrete and the interior plaster walls, beneath the floor and above the ceiling. The temperature of the surface air within the walls regulates the air in the house.

During 1980 and 1981, artisans specializing in plaster work, tile installation and mosaic inlay hand finished the house. The sinks are glazed Mexican tile. Byers said high-quality craftsmen were on site for months. State building officials, and even a renowned underground housing architect from New Jersey, came to see the house.

The Canadas hauled in native limestone from local quarries but also were known for recycling and reusing building materials. For example, Byers said, much of the stone on the house is 4-inch-thick veneer cut from hand-hewn limestone foundation blocks removed from beneath Bloomington's old Johnson Hardware store.

They salvaged cherry and poplar floor planks from a demolished barn. Along the rear of the house, 120 feet of windows on the ground level look out onto the garden. Hand-crafted arched windows provide views from upstairs.

"People involved in building the house will say that it was an enjoyable construction project," Byers said. "There was no pressure to get done. Everybody had a say, everyone involved felt an ownership and did their best work and had pride."

Its current appearance mirrors the downfall of the once-rich. So do court records at the Justice Building, which show a string of unpaid debts and a foreclosure petition on the house, which is set to be sold at a sheriff's auction Wednesday at 10 a.m.

"When that house came across for sheriff's sale I was really surprised," said Ann Bloxsom, who oversees the foreclosure sales for the Monroe County Sheriff's Department. "I thought there was a lot of money there."

Bloomington appraiser Rich Figg said he has a contract with Union Planters to buy the house after the bank reclaims it at the public sale. He said his future home needs several hundred thousand dollars worth of repairs and renovation before he will be able to move in.

"I know it may seem like a money pit, but three to five years down the road, the house will be magnificent," Figg said. "I like a challenge and I've known that house since I was a kid."

Money trouble in paradise

A foreclosure document filed by Union Planters bank in August 2001 claims that Kathy Canada defaulted on a $553,606 loan that was executed two years earlier.

In October 1999, she used the house as collateral on a 30-year loan at 8.75 percent interest. The $5,086 monthly payments stopped after February 2001. As of August 2001, $548,576 was due on the principle, with another $24,197 in accrued interest.

Several liens against the property are filed in the clerk's office, too — $11,100 against Kathy Canada by USA Mortgage Co., $34,972 against both Canadas through Beneficial Mortgage Co., $12,886 against both by Glesenkamps Designscape and $23,839 against the couple by Bank One.

In November 2001, Tom Canada wrote a letter to Judge David Welch explaining why he had missed a court date regarding the judgments against him. He said he was suffering from pneumonia and that his mother was critically ill in Florida. "I ask your forgiveness for the disarray of my life at the moment," the letter ended.

Two lives

Until recently, Tom Canada, 54, was a figure in Bloomington's business and religious communities. He was a developer, home builder and preservationist who dabbled in ventures ranging from alternative energy-efficient heating/cooling systems to an underground mushroom-growing venture in Utah, friends said.

Canada became intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism in 1970 on a trip to Dharamsala, India, where he met the Dalai Lama. He and his wife donated the land on Snoddy Road for the Tibetan Cultural Center and the Jangchub Chorten memorial. Canada also donated the 3A acres where his father's house once stood for construction of the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the United States — Dagom Geden Tensung Ling — located on Bloomington's north side.

An anti-war and PCB activist, Canada in 1991 attempted to get on the ballot as a candidate for mayor of Bloomington, but he was not allowed to run because he lived 1,000 feet outside the city limits.

A decade later, Canada's life had taken a downturn. He was charged in July 2001 with conversion for taking $222 worth of groceries from Kroger without paying. A theft charge later that year alleged he took a U-Haul trailer from a rental center without paying for it.

On Feb. 3, 2002, Canada was arrested for failure to appear in court on the charges. He was released 12 days later after pleading guilty. Friends said the last they knew, he was living in Florida.

Politics and philanthropy

Before she married Tom Canada, Kathy Canada had married his older brother, in 1967. Larry Canada, a leading anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s, owned the Black Market, a store on Kirkwood Avenue that was firebombed in 1968.

On June 23, 1971, the Daily Herald-Telephone newspaper ran a front-page story in which Kathy Canada, then 24 and the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, charged that the FBI had set up her former husband Larry in regard to a bombing in a rest room at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. She said the FBI was following her and harassing her.

Four years later, Kathy Canada donated the blighted property where the Black Market had been. It's now Peoples Park, and was donated to the city on the condition that it always remain a park.

In 1969, Kathy Canada bought 400 acres in rural northeastern Brown County and established the Kneadmore Commune, an alternative living community in the hills off Plum Creek Road. In 1972, more than 100 people lived there; today, a few remain.

Years passed. Kathy and Tom Canada married and had two sons. In 1980, they started building the Snoddy Road house. Kathy Canada worked as the education director for the Waldron Arts Center from 1992 to 1995, friends said, and she was a volunteer at WFHB before moving to Minneapolis, near her daughter, in recent years.

She left her beloved home, its incredible views of once-vibrant gardens, behind.

But despite years of neglect, lamb's ear, columbine, Shasta daisies and tall purple iris continue to bloom around her wilderness dwelling. Figg said Kathy Canada, 56, and her daughter have agreed to return, someday soon, to help restore the gardens. As they were 20 years ago.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Paradise Lost