He Told Me He Had a Nice Big One … Farm, That Is

(Continued from part 2.)

Anna Yager was not the type to slink off and hide herself in shame. She came back fighting. Soon after her arrest she filed a petition for divorce from Fred, blaming her behavior on her husband's bad character.

From the start, she claimed, she had been the innocent victim of Fred's lies. Throughout their courtship, she had remained in Illinois, artlessly accepting his claims about the big farm he owned in Indiana and the very comfortable income it earned him, never thinking to investigate for herself. She married him, arrived at Ainsworth, and was shocked to discover that Fred's holdings amounted to no more than 15 acres, that his house was a one-room log cabin, and that he lived by hiring himself out as a day laborer, earning less than the equivalent of today's minimum wage. Even when he landed the job at the Hobart power plant, he was making less than he had promised her.

(It's possible that Fred had exaggerated his situation; it's possible that he'd outright lied; but it's also possible that he'd simply told Anna about the various farms in his family — for example, his older brother George, who lived within walking distance of Fred's place, owned a nice spread that grew from 40 acres in 1891 to 120 acres by the 1920s — and Anna got confused about who owned what.)

Anna said that in spite of having been deceived and disappointed, she "tried to make the best of it," but Fred himself was impossible: "he was so quarrelsome that she was finally compelled to leave him."

There's no word in the newspaper report of what, if anything, her divorce petition said about her relations with Jerome Chester.

Anyway, she wanted a divorce and $2,000 in alimony. How she expected a man living on the edge of poverty to come up with $2,000, she did not explain.

[To be continued]

Sources:
♦ "$2,000 Asked for Alimony." Hobart News 15 June 1911.
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.