(Click on images to enlarge)
Not exactly illuminating, is it? The former railroad is now a bike path, and all traces of the depot are gone.
Someone tried to explain its location to me as we looked out the front window of the Merrillville/Ross Township Historical Society Museum on 73rd, just west of Broadway. "It was behind that second evergreen," she said.
Let's hope those evergreens never get cut down.
The postcard is postmarked Dec. 1909, meaning that the depot had but a short time to bear the name of the Chicago, Cincinnati & Louisville Railroad. By July 1910 it would be the Chesapeake & Ohio RR depot.
Here's the verso:
I believe the sender was 19-year-old Hattie Nasshahn McCarty, writing to her brother, Emil (about 22 years old). The Nasshahn family lived in Merrillville — from when, I'm not sure, as I can't find records of them earlier than 1900, but an infant sister, Lydia, who died in 1885, is buried in Merrillville Cemetery, as is their father, Emil Sr. (d. 1891), their mother, Elizabeth (d. 1911), and another sister who died in childhood.
The family earned a mentioned in A Pictorial History of Merrillville, which states that the widowed Elizabeth and her children ran a grocery out of their own home, "located on West 73rd Avenue across from the old Iddings house and adjacent to the Perry Goodrich home."
In 1908 Hattie married Frank McCarty, a railroad telegraph operator — I do wonder if he is one of the men pictured on the postcard! Sometime between 1910 and 1920, the McCarty family moved to Noble County, Indiana, where Frank and Hattie lived out the rest of their lives. As for Emil, he lived, married, fathered, and died in Oregon.
Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ Clemens, Jan, and Merrillville/Ross Twp. Historical Society. A Pictorial History of Merrillville. 1976, updated 1991.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society. Ross Township Cemeteries. 1995.
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