Random Changes

It's December 1918, and things are changing.

Our old acquaintance Alvah Bodamer has given up his threshing business, left Deep River and moved to Valparaiso to take a job with the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Jerome Chester of Chicago has severed his last ties to the soil of Ainsworth by selling his share of the Henry Chester estate, namely 117.5 acres of farmland, to his half-brother Charles, who paid him $10,500 for it.

In Hobart, William and Antonia Rossow have sold 30 acres lying north of the Pennsy Railroad and west of Wisconsin Street, part of the land that they have farmed for 14 years. They retain about 2.5 acres where their home and outbuildings sit, and some acreage south of the tracks. The event is so momentous as to rate its own story in both of Hobart's newspapers — or perhaps that is owing to the media savvy of the buyers, a couple of real estate dealers from Valparaiso. The buyers intend to subdivide the land and sell it as home lots. "The land is advantageously situated for subdivision purposes," says the Gazette, and indeed it is (for the moment), being right on the streetcar line. The News notes that the Rossows had given the streetcar company right-of-way through their land for free. The story that has come down in the family is that William did that to persuade the streetcar company to run the line through his land, so this may be the culmination of his clever plan to increase the value of the land and then sell it.


Sources:
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 13 Dec. 1918; 12 Dec. 1918.
♦ "Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Rossow Sell Their Farm to Real Estate Firm." Hobart News 19 Dec. 1918.
♦ "Wm. Rossow Farm Sold." Hobart Gazette 20 Dec. 1918.