Portable Housing

I've mentioned Eugene Chandler here and there, only, it seems, in connection with his misfortunes, such as the time he broke his collar bone in the Ainsworth barbershop disaster, or when his young family fell ill with the Spanish influenza.

Eugene's father, Sylvester, was the only son of Thomas Peach Chandler, who settled in Lake County in 1854 on an 80-acre farm about a mile west of the village of Deep River. Eugene, born in 1886, grew up in the Deep River area. He was a farm boy, and after his marriage to Carrie Schnabel early in 1910, he continued to farm, but on other people's land. For example, the birth of his first child in 1910 finds him on the farm of his uncle, Nathaniel P. Banks, south of Hobart; soon thereafter he moved to the W.B. Owen farm (the location of which I don't know), and then in 1911 to the Kruse farm southeast of Ainsworth. In 1915 he moved from there to "the Gordon farm," somewhere south of Hobart.

That's a lot of moving. But the Gordon farm was the last stop before Eugene finally got a farm of his own. In July 1919 he bought the Anna Franz farm, an 88-acre spread about three miles west of Hobart. That farm had no house, no barn, no improvements of any kind, so the little Chandler family remained on the Gordon farm, to harvest their season's work and await the completion of their new home.

Now we have to mention another of Eugene's misfortunes. About 6:30 on the morning of July 29, someone passing by the Gordon farm noticed smoke coming from the top of the farmhouse, and alerted the Chandler family. Eugene and Carrie got their children safe, and by quick work managed to save most of their furniture and personal effects. But in spite of the best efforts of the Hobart fire department, the house was destroyed. The News added:

Mr. Chandler's loss is fully covered by insurance, but even so, that does not replace eighty gallons of pure cider vinegar, some fifteen gallons of lard and forty or fifty quarts of canned fruit.

If those items were of home manufacture, they represented a tremendous amount of work.

And there was the Chandler family, with their old house in ruins and their new house not yet even begun. So they turned to the 1919 version of a mobile home — bought a small house in the village of Wheeler and simply had it picked up and moved to the Gordon farm.

By mid-August Eugene had broken ground for a brick house on his new farm. James H. Carpenter was to build it.


Sources:
♦ 1874 Plat Map.
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ "Additional Local News." Hobart Gazette 15 Aug. 1919.
♦ "Death of an Old Citizen." Hobart Gazette 4 Nov. 1904.
♦ "Fire Destroys Residence of Gordon Farm South of Hobart." Hobart News 7 Aug. 1919.
♦ "House on Gordon Farm Burns." Hobart Gazette 8 Aug. 1919.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 10 July 1919.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 2 Sept. 1910; 17 Nov. 1911;
♦ WWI Draft Cards.