Yet More Land Changing Hands

When Swan Peter Carlson died in 1919, he had been a Hobart resident for five years but still owned a farm in Ross Township.

As we learned from his obituary, Swan had settled on the "Harper homestead" when he moved to Indiana from Chicago in 1890. The 1874 plat map shows us 80 acres in Ross Township belonging to a C. Harper (possibly Calvin), and the 1908 plat map shows those same 80 acres owned by "S.P. & H. Carlson" — Swan Peter and (I believe) his wife, Hedvig (or "Hadwick," per the 1910 census).


(Click on image to enlarge)

Late in August 1919, their daughter, Augusta Koehler, "traded her home and twenty acres on the Ainsworth road for a residence in Chicago," according to the News ("the Ainsworth road" being known now as Grand Boulevard, or State Road 51). It is not clear to me whether those 20 acres were all that was left of the old homestead, or whether that was only Augusta's share, the remainder being divided among her brothers. The buyer of the 20 acres was one "Wm. Blumenthal of Chicago."

I gather that Mr. Blumenthal was an acquaintance of John Dorman and intended to be an absentee landlord, as we find John Dorman, in the September 5 Gazette, offering for rent "the Carlson 20-acre farm 1½ miles south of Hobart."


Sources:
♦ 1870 Census.
♦ 1874 Plat Map.
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1908 Plat Map.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ "All Kinds of Wants." Hobart Gazette 5 Sept. 1919.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 4 Sept. 1919.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 29 Aug. 1919.