My dad, Chris Nix, was fifty-seven when he bought the property we now call the Sanctuary. It was the fruition of a dream he had built with my mother, Dorothy, over the course of their long marriage. He had little formal education, and had to start work as a child. By the time he was fourteen, he built a tractor from discarded parts retrieved from neighboring farmers and used it to cultivate his family’s farm. By the time he was sixteen, he was a lead welder at the Portland, Oregon, shipyards, building LSTs, and by the time he was eighteen he was jumping out of C-47 planes as an Army paratrooper.

When he was only nineteen years old, he was named honor guard to five star General Douglas MacArthur and accompanied him to Japan for the first months of the initial occupation. In fact, his plane landed before MacArthur’s did. During his time in the service, he met Dorothy Owens, and after an extremely short courtship, they married, paying one dollar to the minister and celebrating with hamburgers at a local diner for a grand total of two dollars. Chris worked first as a laborer for a construction company, and then decided to attend mechanical arts school where he apprenticed in carpentry. At twenty-nine, knowing that he had a partner in Dorothy, he left the construction company to start their own business, and his reputation was already such that a sizeable group of men followed him. With Dorothy as his business partner, his bookkeeper, his accountant, and his sounding board, the business grew from homebuilding to commercial and industrial projects. Many of the landmark buildings in and around Evansville were built by the Nix Construction Company, including the libraries at both University of Southern Indiana and University of Evansville, the AB Brown Power Plant in Mount Vernon, as well as many other schools, hospitals, and local businesses. Even after he retired, Chris and Dorothy were involved in historic preservation projects in New Harmony and at the Reitz Home Museum, and Chris volunteered as a construction manager in multiple capacities into his late eighties.

They chose this place because they had been living in a very confined urban space, next to a railroad track, the state garage and a warehouse. Dad had grown up in the cornfields of Iowa, and he missed being surrounded by natural beauty. They bought the land from a family friend, sixty-two acres, and Chris built the house with the help of family and the men who worked with him, who were his friends and some of the best craftsmen in the area, pouring the foundation as if for an industrial project, so that it could bear the weight of forty stories. The structure is built to withstand any manner of natural disasters.

In the last days of his life, Dad and I talked about what I would do with the property that I was to inherit. I felt a sense of peace the first time we considered the possibility that this place that provided such beauty to five generations of our family might be perfect for gatherings of artists. It was an easy decision to make! We could honor my parents and my sister, Donna, who had died nearly two decades earlier and was a much loved and respected reading specialist. My mom, Dorothy, was voracious in her reading and read easily two thousand pages every week, checking out anywhere from six to eight tomes every two weeks from the library. The idea of filling the house with writers, that my parents’ and sister’s legacies might serve as support to the completion of literary and other creative projects, filled me with quiet joy and continues to give solace.

On behalf of my family, welcome to The Sanctuary! We hope you, too, find beauty and inspiration here.

Sincerely,
Barbara Nix Liffick