The American Dream and the Indiana Summer

I'm trying to pin down the identity of a "young blacksmith" named Pete who is mentioned twice in the Gazette's "Ainsworth Pick-Ups" column of 1910. The census taken in May 1910 shows a Pete Nelson, 26 years old, living with the Lindborg family, and although he described himself as a laborer doing odd jobs, he may well have taken on the role of assistant blacksmith if Gust Lindborg had a lot of work that summer.

The census gave his country of birth as Norway, while the Gazette attributed him to both Denmark and Sweden — the paper couldn't keep its story straight — but I'm inclined to think they were both the same Pete and the Gazette simply got confused among the Scandinavian countries. Anyway, I can't find a more likely candidate.

You can scan down the page of the census report where Pete appears and see that most of his neighbors were either immigrants themselves, or the children of immigrants, primarily from Germany. They or their parents had come in search of the American dream, and so had Pete. But it seems Pete was especially sensitive to the Indiana summer.

I grew up here in northwest Indiana in a house with no air conditioning, and I don't know how I stood it — and we had electricity to run window fans to draw in the cooler air at night. How earlier generations stood it, with their heavier clothing and their lack of electricity and running water, is simply beyond my understanding. Heat waves sometimes go on for days; even the nights are muggy, and it's hard to sleep in a house that retains the sun's heat for hours. If the mosquitoes aren't too bad, you may be able to sleep outside — but here in Ainsworth we have enough mosquitoes to populate several galaxies.

At the beginning of September 1910, when summer was still in full blast, the Gazette reported, "Pete the young blacksmith says this country is too hot for him and he is thinking of returning to Denmark." By mid-October he had fled back to the milder summers of his homeland, wherever that might have been. And so for Pete the American dream was cut short by the nightmare of the Indiana summer.

Gust and Anna Lindborg evidently were made of sterner stuff. Perhaps on hot days when the sun baked their house and shop, and on humid nights when the mosquitoes swarmed, they thought back regretfully to the gentle Swedish summers of their youth, but they stayed here and took whatever the Indiana summer dished out.

Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ "Ainsworth Pick-Ups." Hobart Gazette 2 Sept. 1910; 21 Oct. 1910.