A Sad Year for the Sauter Girls

(Click on image to enlarge)
The wedding portrait of Warren Boyd and Lizzie Sauter, 1904. (Image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.)

Clara and Lizzie Sauter, the daughters of Ed and Augusta, can't be said to have much of an Ainsworth connection: they spent about five of their teenage years here, that's it. But as far as I'm concerned, once an Ainsworthian, always an Ainsworthian. And I had such hopes for Clara and Lizzie. Whatever the financial troubles of their family were, whatever the less-than-ideal state of their parents' marriage may have been, the two Sauter girls seemed destined for greater happiness.

They both married well. In April 1904, Lizzie married Warren Boyd, of the Merrillville Boyds, and the young couple went to live on his farm. In February 1907, Clara married John Rowe, Jr., a popular young man from a respectable Hobart family, who worked as a foreman at a steel company. They set up housekeeping in Hobart. All was going well.

And then came 1910.

In December 1909, Warren Boyd had fallen ill with pneumonia. For over a month he could not even leave the house. He recuperated slowly and by February 1910 was able to get around again. Then he suffered a relapse, but this time it was tuberculosis, the fast kind. He died on May 12, only 26 years old.

Ed Sauter, now living separately from his wife, came down from Chicago for the funeral.

Lizzie was left a widow with two little sons, Harold, age 4, and Elmer, just two and a half. I don't know what her financial condition was. Warren's estate, including Holstein dairy cattle, Poland China pigs, a horse, buggies, wagons and tools, as well as household furniture, was all sold at auction by his administrator, N.P. Banks. It should have raised a decent amount of money for Lizzie, if there were no debts to be paid. But when she came back to Hobart to live — to be near her own mother, I suppose — she took a job clerking at Scheidt and Keilman's store.

You'd think that one young mother widowed would be grief enough for one family in one year, wouldn't you? But Death didn't. It came back for a visit in the summer.

After a brief illness, John Rowe died on August 3. He was 36 years old. He had been a member of several fraternal organizations, including the Masons, and a remarkable number of people attended the funeral, held in his Lillian Street home.

Now Clara was a widow, too. Their son, Robert John, was about one year old. He would probably have no memory of his father.

As I said, 1910 was a bad year, even for people with only a slender Ainsworth connection.



Warren Boyd's grave marker, in the Merrillville Cemetery:


(Click on images to enlarge)

John Rowe's grave marker, in the Hobart Cemetery:





Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ "Administrator's Sale." Hobart Gazette 17 June 1910.
♦ Clemens, Jan. A Pictorial History of Merrillville. Hobart: Review Printers, Inc., 1991.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 1 Mar. 1907.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 4 Feb. 1910; 9 Dec. 1910.
♦ "Married in Hobart." Hobart Gazette 22 Apr. 1904.
♦ "Obituary." Hobart Gazette 12 Aug. 1910.
♦ "Warren Boyd Passes Away." Hobart Gazette 20 May 1910.