(Click on images to enlarge)
Top image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.
No date was given for the top image, on display in the Hobart Historical Society Museum. I'm only estimating that it's around the turn of the century based on the absence of automobiles in the photo. The house stands west of Ainsworth, on 70th Avenue just west of DeKalb. These days if you tried to take a picture of it from the same spot as the original photographer, you'd find yourself running into a wild hedge along the south side of the road.
I don't know who any of those people were, but evidently they liked dogs. Surely some or all of them were members of the extended Bullock family — and it was very extended indeed throughout the Ainsworth-Hobart area — but which ones, I couldn't tell you.
This was the homestead of Gilbert and Estella Bullock. It had its beginning just before their marriage in 1876, when, according to an 1882 biographical sketch, Gilbert bought "forty acres of improved land, with good frame house and outbuildings" in Ross Township. (Based on that description, and also because the 1890 Plat Book shows Gilbert owning the land on which this house stands, I'm jumping to the conclusion that this house and the 1876 house are one and the same, aside from a little remodeling.)
Gilbert was the son of Moses and Amanda Bullock, who farmed in Ross Township west of Ainsworth. Moses and Amanda also had one daughter, Ruth, who married a man named Halladay, and two other sons, both of whom eventually moved to Hobart: Simeon, who was an ice dealer, among other things, and Asa, a lawyer. The Bullock family had the habit of recycling names — e.g., among Asa's sons were a Gilbert and another Asa — which makes grief for the historian, especially as they were active, talented people, often in the news.
But back to our Gilbert! On Christmas Day, 1876, he married Estella Markham. By the turn of the century they had four children, Hubert, Claude, Ruth and Etta, all born on the farm pictured above.
Through additional purchases over the years, the Bullock farm expanded from its original 40 acres to cover some 200 acres. Gilbert and Estella seemed to have owned (for a while, at least) another good parcel of land north of Ainsworth, on the west side of State Road 51 near the Deep River, but apparently their ownership fell into the blank between the 1891 Plat Book and the 1926 Plat Book.
In the spring of 1901, Hubert Bullock married Miss Daisy Lambert, daughter of Dr. Clara Faulkner of Hobart (by a previous marriage, perhaps?); the young couple moved in with his parents. In the autumn of that year, Claude married Almantha Smith.
Early in 1902, Gilbert and Estella, with their two daughters, retired to Hobart, leaving the old homestead in the hands of one of their sons — I'm not sure which, since reports varied; but both sons continued farming for the moment. Both of the Bullock daughters later married Hobart men — in 1910, Ruth married Dr. Dwight Mackey, and in 1912 Etta became Mrs. William J. Killigrew.
Hubert and Daisy had two sons, Elmer (born 1903) and Cecil (born 1910). This family portrait shows Hubert and Elmer along with (at left) Estella Bullock, Hubert's mother, and (at right) Emily Markham, Estella's mother.
(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.
Hubert not only farmed, but made extra money using his up-to-date machinery to grind feed, saw wood and press hay for his neighbors. During the summer of 1909 he even found time to play with the Crown Point baseball team.
As I mentioned in another post, early in 1911 he began further supplementing his income by selling Abbott-Detroit automobiles. He caught the automotive fever in a big way. By the autumn of 1911 he abandoned farming — and Ainsworth — to move to Valparaiso, where he ran an automotive sales-and-service business in partnership with a Valpo man. That enterprise lasted about a year and a half, then Hubert moved to Hobart where he opened his own garage.
Claude got out of farming earlier than Hubert. He had continued to work the family acres during the course of his first marriage; it was tragically brief, for Almantha had tuberculosis. She died, childless, on February 25, 1905, just four days after her 23rd birthday. (She is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery.) Before the year was out, Claude had announced his intention to give up farming, sold all his farming equipment, and moved to Hobart. We get no clue of the kind of work he did there until the 1910 census, wherein he describes himself as a laborer working in the house-moving business. In Hobart he met Mary Ann Chandler, who became his second wife on November 4, 1909.
In March 1912 Claude returned to farming; he and Mary moved to his parents' other farm, somewhere north of Ainsworth.
About a year later, that became his parents' only farm. Early in April 1913 Gilbert and Estella sold the old homestead, all 200 acres of it, to a newcomer from Iowa named Albion D. Paine.
And that is where we must leave the Bullocks for now.
Sources:
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ "Additional Local News." Hobart Gazette 23 Apr. 1915.
♦ "Ainsworth Pick-Ups." Hobart Gazette 1 July 1910.
♦ "Bullock-Lambert Nuptial." Hobart Gazette 5 Apr. 1901.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 21 Mar. 1902; 15 Dec. 1905; 25 Jan. 1907.
♦ "Gilbert Bullock Sells 200-Acre Farm for $20,000." Hobart News 3 Apr. 1913.
♦ Goodspeed, Weston A., and Charles Blanchard (eds.). Counties of Porter and Lake, Indiana. Historical and Biographical. Chicago: F.A. Battey & Co., 1882.
♦ "Hubert Bullock Opens Garage and Auto Repair Shop." Hobart News 9 Apr. 1913.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 17 Jan. 1902; 26 June 1903; 7 May 1909; 1 Apr. 1910; 1 Mar. 1912.
♦ "Mortuary Record." Hobart Gazette 3 Mar. 1905.
♦ "Obituary." Hobart Gazette 10 July 1903.
♦ "Sold Out." Hobart Gazette 14 Mar. 1913.
♦ "The Car You Want." Hobart Gazette 27 Jan. 1911.
♦ "Young People Marry." Hobart Gazette 15 Nov. 1901.
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