The City Loses Its Owner

It took John E. Mander's death for me to find out that he never actually lived in Ainsworth, although he did business here and may have once "owned nearly the entire city of Ainsworth." As I've previously noted, as late as 1908 the "Mander elevator" was still standing in Ainsworth — exact location unknown.

Anyway, his obituary in the February 18, 1910 issue of the Hobart Gazette gives a sketch of his life, and if you don't want to read the microfilm, you can find it summarized nicely in Along the Route: A History of Hobart, Indiana, Post Offices and Postmasters. Born in Sweden in 1838, educated for the ministry at Stockholm; came to the U.S. at 20 years of age; worked at an unnamed large store in Chicago, then came to Hobart, to teach and to mercantilize, to master the post and to marry — but not to preach, in spite of his education, nor to practice law, in spite of his admission to the bar. In 1888 he traded his Ainsworth and Hobart holdings for a flour mill and farm in Porter County, which he operated for ten years before returning to Hobart and resuming his merchant trade. His wife and four of their children were living on the Porter County farm when he died.

I've heard of people staying at the Hobart House to get medical attention, and John Mander was one of them. He had been staying there for six days being treated for a variety of ailments when at last pneumonia took him off.

I don't believe he had any particular fondness for Ainsworth, however much of it he may have owned, and his store was almost pointedly in competition with William Raschka's store here — e.g., in the summer of 1906 when William advertised his binder twine at 9 cents a pound, John responded with an ad offering binder twine "a half cent a pound less at Mander's than can be bought elsewhere." (Take that, Ainsworth.) He sold all manner of things, including woolen blankets, Christmas toys, and oleomargarine, which he considered "superior to butter." (Take that, you Ainsworth dairy farmers.)

The obituary fails to mention that he and his wife, Mary Ellen Shearer, separated in 1898. In 1908 she sued him for divorce, citing "cruel and inhuman treatment" and seeking "custody of the minor children and $1,000 alimony." Through his attorney, John denied her allegations and claimed that she and their grown sons "treated him cruelly and brutally." I seem to recall reading that they reached some sort of truce and the divorce did not go through, although apparently I was in one of those moods where I lost patience with noting down every detail about people who once used to sort of have an Ainsworth connection, so I can't give you a source. But it doesn't appear that she was with him during those last six days at the Hobart House.

After his death, his daughter Etta purchased the store and its inventory from his estate, and ran the store herself. She had been working with him there for the past seven years, so she knew a thing or two about store-running. A few weeks later she and Albert Orcott were married by the Rev. T.H. Ball himself. I hope their marriage was happier than her parents'.

And that's all I have for John Eric Mander, who once used to sort of have an Ainsworth connection. May he rest in peace.

Sources:
♦ Ballantyne, Dorothy, and Robert Adams. Along the Route: A History of Hobart, Indiana, Post Offices and Postmasters. Hobart: The Hobart Historical Society, Inc., 1992.
♦ "Binder Twine For Sale." Hobart Gazette 29 June 1906.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 20 July 1906.
♦ "Hobart Couple Marry." Hobart Gazette 22 July 1910.
♦ "Hobart's Oldest Merchant Dead." Hobart Gazette 18 Feb. 1910.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 18 Dec. 1903; 9 Dec. 1904; 1 July 1910.
♦ "Wants One Thousand Alimony." Hobart Gazette 24 July 1908.