The Greatest of Ease

Around Ainsworth, it seems that the Henry Chester farm was the place where farmhands went to die.

We've already told the story of Herbert Riddle, who died in June 1910 after a corn-shredder accident.

Ten years earlier, a married couple had hired on sometime after the June 1900 census: William Wollman as farmhand, his wife as a housemaid. By the end of August, William was dead of sunstroke. After the funeral, his wife declared her intention to go back to the old country.

In November of 1913, a 58-year-old man from Milwaukee named George Buchanan hired on at the farm, which was now under the supervision of the former Mary Chester and her new husband, John A. McDaniel.

Within ten days, George was dead.

He died on a Saturday morning, of asthma and heart trouble according to the coroner's inquest. Undertaker Alwin Wild of Hobart took charge of the body until George's family could be notified.

George's only son, Archie, came down from Madison, Wisconsin, to see to the funeral. He told the locals that his father had been "a trapeze performer with the Sells-Forepaugh circus for 19 years."

What a comedown! I suppose old age and ill health forced him off the trapeze. And so it was that as a common farmhand, here in Ainsworth, he found, at last, the greatest of ease.

His obituary says that he was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, but I have not been able to find his grave marker.



Sources:
♦ "Death Comes to Geo. Buchanan at Home of J.A. McDaniel." Hobart News 20 Nov. 1913.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 7 Sept. 1900.