A New Guardian for Daisy's Daughters

Toward the latter part of January 1919, Mrs. John A. McDaniel (Henry Chester's widow) came down from Chicago to attend "to some business affairs." The Gazette did not mention the nature of her business, but it may have involved guardianship of her Scroggins granddaughters. She had been in Hobart the previous October on just such business.

The next month, the Gazette noted:

Last Friday [Feb. 28] the judge of the Lake circuit court appointed Chas. Chester as guardian for the two Scroggins children, daughters of [E.D.] Scroggins of this city. The girls, who are aged about 9 and 11 years, are living with their grandmother, Mrs. J.A. McDaniel, in Chicago. They have quite a little estate left them by their mother.

That inheritance was, of course, their mother's share of the estate of her father, Henry Chester.

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Smallpox had recently "invaded" Crown Point and Merrillville, but the young people of Hobart were not troubled about that. Their concern, according to the Gazette, was that they had no place to dance. The Strattan hall was being used for storage; the Black hall (location unknown) was just too small for a proper dance; and the Odd Fellows weren't renting out their hall at the moment, as they were about to begin remodeling. "Can you blame the young people for feeling bad?" asked the Gazette. "They like to dance and want to dance, but where can they? Only by going out of town, and that is very undesirable. Who will build a dance hall?"

The next week's Gazette amended that report at the protest of Simeon Bullock, an Odd Fellow. Their hall, he said, was indeed available and could be rented whenever it was not in use by the Odd Fellows, or otherwise previously engaged. So, after all, the young people of Hobart did have somewhere to dance, and to spread smallpox.


Sources:
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 11 Oct. 1918; 24 Jan. 1919; 7 Mar. 1919.
♦ "No Place in Town to Dance." Hobart Gazette 7 Mar. 1919.
♦ "Will Rent Hall For Dances." Hobart Gazette 14 Mar. 1919.