A Klan Picnic

I will be spending two hours every Saturday morning for a long, long, long time to come in front of the microfilm machine at the Hobart Historical Society museum. I have begun reading the Hobart newspapers. They are not searchable, in the database sense. You have to put the microfilm in the machine and just start reading page after page.

I started with the 1927 newspapers because I wanted to find out whatever I could about Chester's Camp. I think it's a wild goose chase. The business at Chester's Camp came from passing tourists, so the Chesters probably never advertised in local papers. And John's 1927 arrest didn't make the Hobart paper. We'll see. Chester's Camp had about eight more years of operation, and at the rate I'm going, it will take about eight years to read all those newspapers. We'll see what they say when we get to 1933 and that shooting.

All of this to explain that in my reading I'm stumbling across random bits and pieces of information that I may post here, in the disjointed and irrelevant way I'm so good at.

For instance, what do you suppose happened in Hobart on Labor Day of 1927? That's right, the Ku Klux Klan had its usual picnic. We've already seen them trying to intimidate an Ainsworth shopkeeper in 1924. Now we can see them at play.

The picnic was held in "Klan park," wherever that might be. There were speeches, games and races, and then a "class" of about 50 people went over to the Masonic Hall on Center Street, where something called the "K-duo degree" was awarded.

And then the usual parade, with members wearing "regulation regalia." Some wore their "visors" up, some down.


Members of the Ku Klux Klan parading down Third Street in Hobart in the early 1920s. Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.


Source: "Ku Klux Klan Holds Usual Labor Day Picnic." The Hobart News 8 Sept. 1927.