Ainsworth Station

I believe it was in Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Rabin (a book I highly recommend) that I read of the establishment of towns along new railroads crossing the Great Plains — towns set up entirely by the agents of the railroad, who were instructed to locate a town every so many miles along the railroad, and who assigned each town a name pulled out of their own whimsy. And so a station would be built, and the town would grow up around it, with no more basis than that the railroad happened to pick that spot.

I don't know in what way Ainsworth existed before the Grand Trunk Railroad was built through Lake County in 1880 and established the "Ainsworth" station. I have a map of Lake County published in 1876 on which Ainsworth does not appear, although such distinguished metropolises as Liverpool, Tollestone and Ross appear, as does Hobart, of course.

On this 1876 map I do see a road resembling Ainsworth Road, and there's a little house icon where Ainsworth Road crosses what seems to be the beginnings of Grand Boulevard. I don't have the whole atlas with its key, so I don't know what the house icon represents.

(By the way, I will start publishing images as soon as my new memory card arrives and I install it. Right now my computer is teetering on the brink of the Chasm of Unremembering and can't handle the scanning of images.)

Then comes 1880, and the Grand Trunk Railroad builds a station with a day telegraph office, somewhere close to the junction of the railroad, Grand Boulevard and Ainsworth Road. I have no idea what induced the railroad to put a station there, whether it was a matter of a station every X number of miles, or a promising junction of roads, or some person(s) with influence.

Trains traveling westward toward Chicago, originating in Ft. Gratiot, Michigan, or Valparaiso, Indiana, stopped in Ainsworth daily at 7:03 AM and 5:08 PM. Eastbound trains, from Chicago to Fort Gratiot or Valparaiso, made the Ainsworth stop at 11:07 AM and 7:21 PM daily, with a Sunday train at 3:17 PM. Local farmers shipped milk from the Ainsworth station to Chicago by the morning trains; evening trains returned the empty milk cans.

By 1882 Ainsworth had a post office (closed 1934); by 1900 the Rev. T.H. Ball described Ainsworth as "quite a shipping point for milk" with "some other business interests, with a population now of about fifty, fourteen families. It has a school house but no church." (Whether the school house referred to is the two-story brick one still standing, I'm not sure. Kenneth J. Schoon gives two dates for the building of an Ainsworth school — 1900 and 1912.)

I don't know the precise location of the station, but I have an idea, based on the 1939 aerial image. More on that later.

Somehow I have the idea that the station ceased operation in 1971, but I don't know where I got that figure.

By the time I moved here in 1990, Ainsworth as a town was imperceptible. The town itself was not incorporated, and no signs on the road bade you welcome to Ainsworth. My first month here, a neighbor who stopped by to talk to the guy pumping out my septic tank said something to me about "us folks here in Ainsworth," and that was the first I heard of such a place. As Hobart's fight to annex the Ainsworth area intensified, I would notice, as I drove around, that some yards had signs reading "Freedom for Ainsworth," or similar slogans. Ainsworth didn't get its freedom, as we know; it disappeared into Hobart. Its only revenge was that the Hobart mayor who had presided over the annexation effort, Robert Malizzo, was voted out of office largely by Ainsworth-area voters.

Sources:

• Ball, the Rev. Timothy Horton, Northwest Indiana from 1800 to 1900 (1900).
• Ball, the Rev. Timothy Horton, Encyclopedia of Genealogy and Biography of Lake County, Indiana (1904), as transcribed at Genealogy Trails.
• Chicago and Grand Trunk Railway Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1883).
• Schoon, Kenneth J., Calumet Beginnings: Ancient Shorelines and Settlements at the South End of Lake Michigan (2003).