That's For Us to Know and You to Find Out

In honor of Halloween, here's a couple of boys dressed up as a donkey, on the grounds of the Ainsworth school:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

They weren't dressing that way for Halloween — it was their costume for a performance by the W.G. Haan students of an operetta, Seeing Nellie Home, in May 1937.*

The two boys were Eldon Harms and Lorin Butt Delmer "John" Foreman.** Which is which in the photo I cannot say, and back in May 1937, whenever anyone would ask them who played the front and who the rear of the donkey, they'd say, "That's for us to know and you to find out."

_____________________
*This seems to be the gist of the notes on the back, but I haven't been able to locate any such operetta. "Seeing Nellie Home" may have been a featured song rather than the name of the operetta.
**[11/4/2014 update] Whoever wrote the notes on the back of the photo was wrong, or so Eldon Harms has told me: it was Delmer "John" Foreman under that donkey suit with him, not Lorin Butt. And they took turns playing the front and the back of the donkey.

William Strong

Among the pleasant social news from "South of Deepriver" in early August 1921 — including Milan Hurlburt's 71st birthday — we find a couple of Ross Township farmers driving up to Lake Station (fka East Gary) to care for a sick man. I think Arthur Strong was a nephew to William, but I don't know how William Bowman fit into the family, if he did.


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Hobart News 11 Aug. 1921.

William Strong died a couple weeks later.


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Hobart News 1 Sept. 1921.

We've previously met Uncle Thomas Strong.


(Happier news for Hobart's own Everett Newman — winning yet another local race.)

The Milk House

In our previous installment of Stuff That Used to Be Around Big Maple Lake, I mentioned the lingering remains of what appears to have been a small terracotta-block building with electricity. Here's the building those ruins seem to resemble:


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

A milk house is where the full milk cans were kept cool in tanks of water until they could be shipped to the milk-bottling factory. In Henry Nolte's time, the electrical pump that drew water into the tanks was controlled by a big throw-switch on the wall. That switch always sparked when you turned it on, which scared the little neighbor kid who would tell me about it 80 years later.

That wheeled contraption out front is a milk cart, built to carry cans of milk from the barn to the milk house, and from the milk house to the truck that would carry them away to their rendezvous with destiny.



The problem I have with connecting this building to the foundation among the trees east of Big Maple Lake (small foundation, bits of terracotta blocks, porcelain insulators and shreds of metal wire) is that, as we see from the photo, the milk house was right next to the main house, and the ruins out in the woods that seem to correspond to the main house are at some distance from the little foundation. So I must be wrong about something, and perhaps many things.

Ford v. Cement Truck

Apparently, if you were bored in Hobart, you could go hang around the Nickel Plate Garage and wait for something to happen. Just one day after the barber-v.-barber grudge match, a cement truck showed what it could do to a Ford car out in front of the Nickel Plate Garage. The Ford belonged to our friend Roland Dolphus Sizelove.


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"Local and Personal," Hobart News 11 Aug. 1921.

In news of other acquaintances — yet another relative for the mysterious Mary Kipp. "Mrs. Wm. Halsted" may have been W.O.'s widow, Barbara; that was how the Gazette of August 12 identified a woman beginning a new house on Garfield Street, though there could have been two such women.

And Vera Quinlan had a job in Gary. From the next day's Gazette, we learn that her brother, Lester, who was then about 16 or 17, had joined the National Guard:


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"Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 12 Aug. 1921.

… and yes, Mrs. Gottfried Mayer was Oscar's sister-in-law.

Catherine Quinlan McAuliffe

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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Jocelyn Hahn Johnson.

I have already told most of what I know of Catherine (Quinlan) McAuliffe. Here is a little glimpse of her personality:



… That is, her personality as described by her daughter, Mary, to someone else, who wrote these notes on the back of the photo.

The photo is undated, but could not be later than October 1899. To my eyes, both the fashion of her blouse and her apparent age suggest the 1890s. That means the photo was taken some years before it was printed on this divided-back postcard dating to 1907 or later.

Brawling Barbers

Passersby near the Nickel Plate Garage on the evening of August 9, 1921, were provided free entertainment courtesy of Hazard Halsted and Clifford O. Mize.


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Hobart Gazette 12 Aug. 1921.

Jennie

As promised, here's an update on the story of Jennie Ols.

Well, it was as I suspected: Frank* Fasel had gotten the teenaged Jennie pregnant. In 1916 Jennie gave birth to a little girl, Lela. Jennie's parents kept this little granddaughter in their household and raised her as their own. In February of 1920, when Sam Woods came around to take the census, the Olses described Lela as their daughter, and while Sam might have known differently, he wrote "daughter" for Lela, just as he had for the other daughters in the home.

By then, Jennie was out of her parents' house. In November 1919, she had married Charles Mosher. They lived in the village of Beatrice, in northwest Porter Township, Porter County. Charles worked as a section foreman for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.

For Charles, this was a second marriage — he had lost his first wife, Mary, in August 1918. The 1920 census shows three children from that first marriage in the Mosher household. (To the draft board in 1917, Charles said he had a wife and four children to support; I don't know how to account for the fourth child in 1920.)

The photo below, taken about 1925, shows Charles and Jennie Mosher with Helen (a child of Charles' first marriage) and Raymond (a child of Charles and Jennie, born circa 1921). The location is thought to be one of the farms around Ainsworth.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Fred Ols.

Charles and Jennie also had a daughter named Winifred, born around 1926.

The fact that Charles' first marriage took place in 1909, when he was only 16 years old, leads me to suspect that he might have been unusually understanding of what Jennie had gone through at that age, if he knew about it. When I hear of a boy of 16 getting married, I have visions of shotguns.

Charles and Jennie had almost 20 years together. On May 21, 1939, Charles died. Here is his obituary:

Charles William Mosher, age 46 years, died Sunday evening at 6 o'clock at his home in Beatrice, in Porter township, Porter county, following a heart attack. He was taken ill about 5:30 o'clock and died before medical aid could be summoned. Dr. Carl M. Davis, Porter county coroner, was called.

Mr. Mosher has been a section foreman for the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad for the last 20 years.

Surviving are the widow, Jennie; four sons, David, Donald and Raymond, of Beatrice, and Kenneth, of Alabama; two daughters, Mrs. Helen Ols,** of Gary, and Winifred, of Beatrice; his father, John Mosher, of Gary; one brother, Harvey, of Gary, and two sisters, Mrs. Clara Van Blaircom, of Hobart, and Martha Mosher, of Chicago.

Memorial services will be held Wednesday afternoon at 2:30 daylight savings time, at the Salem church. Burial will be in Salem cemetery.

By May 1940, Jennie had married another section foreman, Herman Wagner. If she had any children with him, I don't know about them. She died in 1967 and is buried in Salem Cemetery.

________________________
*I am using the name given in the contemporary newspaper reports. Family tradition attributes the pregnancy to a Joe Fasel, whom I can't identify. (Family tradition also suggests that Jennie wasn't the only young woman in the area to have a baby out of wedlock by Joe, or Frank, or whatever his name was — but that's historical gossip, which I can't document.)
**Going by the 1940 census, I believe Helen Mosher married Jennie's younger brother, Ervin Ols.


Sources:
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ "Heart Attack Brings Death." The Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.) 22 May 1939.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ Indiana WPA Death Records Index.
♦ WWI Draft Cards.

Good Times and Bad Among the Dairy Farmers

The Lake County Milk Producers' Association made big plans for a picnic in August 1921, enticing potential attendees with an offer of free milk as well as lots of fun.


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Hobart News 11 Aug. 1921.

Meanwhile, Everett Newman wins another "away" race; and the mysterious Miss Kipp attends a family reunion of her sister's in-laws, accompanied as usual by Dr. Clara Faulkner, and unexpectedly (to me, at least) by Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Roper.

The picnic was a success — well attended and fun.


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Hobart News 25 Aug. 1921.


But this was gaiety in the face of hard times: just a week later, the Gazette was complaining that prices paid to milk producers were falling while retail prices remained almost the same — somebody was making money, but it wasn't the farmers, and now their marketing company's bad financial condition was about to force its Gary office to shut down.


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"Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 2 Sept. 1921.

(Also, Mabel's younger brother has a dislocated arm.)

Whatever happened at that meeting in the old town hall was not reported, but a week later the Gazette expressed hopes that the Milk Producers' Association proposition would "be saved from the rocks and placed on a sound working basis." That remains to be seen.


Additional Sources:
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 9 Sept. 1921.
♦ "Milk Producers of Lake County to Have Big Picnic." Hobart Gazette 12 Aug. 1921.
♦ "Notice to Milk Shippers." Hobart News 1 Sept. 1921.

Augusta Stolp Rossow Carey

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.

As an adventurous teenager, Augusta had come to the United States in 1871,* leaving her parents in Germany (to follow some years later). Augusta was trained as a seamstress and planned to earn her own wages. She stayed with relatives in Chicago.

In As It Was Told to Me, Minnie Rossow Harms tells us that the marriage of Augusta's parents, Peter Stolp and Caroline Junke, had been more or less arranged. Peter, a widower with grown children, was a friend of Caroline's father, and the two men decided between themselves that such a marriage would suit both of them. So Caroline, as a young woman, became the wife of a man some 20 years her senior, and they shared a home with her father. The marriage was polite rather than passionate. Caroline hoped for better things for Augusta: a freer choice, perhaps a love match with some handsome young man.

We can't know what motivated Augusta, at about 16 years of age, to marry Henry Rossow. He was not a young man; he was a forty-something widower with three sons ranging in age from toddler to schoolboy. But this was the New World, not the Old Country; Augusta, being neither timid nor dependent, presumably made a free choice. And perhaps it was a love match, after all.

_________________
*1910 Census.

The Noted Chicken Farm and the Disgusting Hog Farm

I don't know anything about the "Chicken Farm," but apparently the Gazette's readers were expected to know all about it, as the paper reported in August 1921: "The noted 'Chicken Farm' gambling house may be transferred into a school house, as East Gary is said to be considering its purchase. A school house is needed in that part of town." So it was somewhere in or near present-day Lake Station.

Elsewhere, the paper noted that "[t]he Berghoff Road House had its grand opening last Saturday evening. This is Hobart's new place south of the Chicken Farm." The two establishments being mentioned in the same paragraph suggests to me that they were of similar character.

♦    ♦    ♦
West of Hobart, a hog farm was stinking up the place. At a special session of the town board on Tuesday evening, August 9, the "secretary of the local board of health was directed, through a notice from the Clerk, to notify the owners of the hog farm, situated in the west part of town, to place their farm of 40 acres in a sanitary condition. This place is known as the Sykes hog farm, the hogs being fed on garbage from Gary." (I have not been able to identify those 40 acres or their owner.)

At the same meeting, Sherman Henderson was appointed to the town board to fill the vacancy left by Hugo Zobjeck's departure the previous spring.


Sources:
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 5 Aug. 1921.
♦ "Town Board Meeting." Hobart Gazette 12 Aug. 1921.

Henry Rossow

(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.

Henry Rossow was born in Germany in 1827. He came to this country early enough in his life that all his children were born here — and he had plenty of children: a dozen that I know of, who reached maturity, and populated this area, and handed down enough historical images and information to fill a blog. His first marriage, to Wilhelmina Kummerow, produced three sons: William, Theodore, and Robert. Among the children of his second marriage, to Augusta Stolp, was Ida Rossow Henrix, whose grandson has given us the image above, and the clipping below that tells how Henry's life was cut short:


Hobart Gazette, 23 Aug. 1895.

Among the grandchildren Henry did not live to see was Minnie Rossow Harms. The story of his death came down to her with a few details differing from the newspaper's version, as she recorded in her manuscript, As It Was Told To Me:

Going back now to the year Summer of 1894,* in the month of August, the exact date was Aug. 17. A church holiday was planned with a basket dinner, a host of relatives and friends were to join them on the morrow — for this was Saturday. Some of these folks were from Chicago so work laid aside, a group of them hitched the old Prince horse to a light wagon and were all set with worms and rods to fish in the near-by river. My grandfather declined. He said, all his grain was laid by, threshing done, hay all made, he'd go to the woods to cut some marsh grass to cover a stack of good hay he had to stack outside and it wouldn't take long and then he'd be thru so by that time you folks, he said, could be home with a mess of fish if they're biting for when I get thru today, he said, I can enjoy a few weeks vacation like before the fall comes and its corn-husking time again and we'll all have a good time tomorrow at the Church Mission (Sunday) Festival to be exact. The Lutherans still set aside a Sunday at the end of the Summer for it and they were all taking a basket dinner so they could enjoy both morning and afternoon services.

Well, with his spirited horses and his jug of water he went to the woods, hitched his horses on the waiting mowing machine. The other group went off with a wagon-full of happy people bent on catching fish. They heard the clatter of the mowing-machine as they passed the marshland (Missouri St. and Road 6 [Old Ridge Road]) but as they neared the corner Oh a sight met their eyes — the eldest daughter with the fishing party (Lizzy Rossow) walked on up to what seemed to be a jumble of horses and mow-machine and there was my grandfather lying on the ground right leg and neck broken. From what they could learn they judged the horses ran away and he wasn't expecting it so he had been jerked to the ground and the heavy wheel ran over his leg so the unexpected jerk also snapped his neck. He must have died instantly for though warm his body was lifeless when found. The family was too grief-stricken to have an outing on the morrow so preparations were made for his funeral and the family needed all the money they could gather together now so my father went to (Hobart) and purchased a cemetery lot, … so midst sympathy, tears and heartaches he was laid to rest there, leaving 5 daughters and 2 sons and his young 36 year old wife [Augusta]. The baby girl Clara was about 3 yrs. old and that was 3 yrs. before I was born. And as long as I can remember it was a yearly task in May — was to pretty up the cemetery lot and fix grandfather's grave.

Henry's grave is in Hobart Cemetery.

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*Minnie was writing from memory, apparently, and was off by one year.

Fred Carbine

Well, guess what. Now I do know where the Hite cottage was, thanks to Suzi Emig's comment on yesterday's post:

My maternal g'father Fred Carbine was the youngest of nine children born to Christian and Caroline Kegebein. He married Anna Buchfuehrer. My mom was their youngest child born in 1921. She said they lived in the house in Ainsworth which is now 7237 Hwy 51 at that time. They moved to 756 Lincoln St. where they raised their family and lived until their deaths. My mom told me that the house originally did not have a basement, so it was raised up and a basement was dug out. I have many happy memories of that house and even got to see the inside with my mom years later when my neighbor's daughter bought the house. My grandfather as a young man worked for the Wood family in Deep River at their store, then delivered for Roper and Brown, so this was probably the grain dealer as per the blurb.

And furthermore she sent me this image of Fred Carbine with a horse-drawn delivery wagon:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Suzi Emig.

The photo is not dated, but may date to the time when Fred was employed at the Wood store, circa 1910.

From the Hobart News of 26 Oct. 1911, his wedding announcement:


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(I began indexing this family under the spelling on the grave marker at Woodvale Cemetery, but apparently the younger generation Americanized it, and I have seen "Carbine" used often in the newspapers. All the same, I'm not going to change my indexing.)

Fire in the Fields

"The month of July broke all records for heat and dryness," said the Hobart News of Aug. 5, 1921. So it's no wonder that sparks or cinders thrown off by steam engines were setting fires in fields beside the railroad tracks.


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Hobart News 4 Aug. 1921.

William Rossow's farm, of course, lay on the west side of Wisconsin Street at the crossing of the (former) Pennsy Railroad. Charles Chester's land was divided by the Grand Trunk Railroad, and if the fire was threatening the Shults oats, it was probably on the Chester land on the south side of the tracks.

And we already knew where Fred Carbein was moving from; now we know where he was moving to — more or less, since I couldn't tell you exactly where in Joryville the "Hite cottage" was.

Why Don't Youse Come Down Some Time?

From the steamer trunk.


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Images courtesy of E. Harms.

Here's Agnes Gottlieb wishing a happy 16th birthday to her friend, Minnie Rossow, just a few days late — the postmark is Feb. 26; Minnie's birthday was the 22nd.

Return-to-Hobart Report

Paul and Bliss Emery are back in Hobart, living with her parents, Calvin and Huldah Shearer. John and Mary McDaniel have left her stepson's house and are living with her son, John Chester, while they think about moving back to Hobart.


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Hobart Gazette 5 Aug. 1921.

I found that story about the Kulage brickyard interesting not only because it had shut down for a while, perhaps due to the general hard times the nation was going through, but also because of the "subway" under "Chicago street," by which I suppose they mean the Chicago road, now known as Old Ridge Road.

And, speaking of the Chicago road, it's about to get improved, "from the brick yards west to Gary city limits," according to the article at the top of the right-hand column.

Brickyard Buddies

A member of the Ols family has allowed the Hobart Historical Society to copy a number of photographs and documents. We shall begin looking at some of those here.

By the Ols family I mean John and Charlotte Ols and their descendants. We have already met two of their sons: Christ (and I shall have an update on that story), and Charles. It is their eldest son, Henry, we are to deal with now.

Henry was born around 1860, when the family was still in Germany (Prussia). They arrived in this country in the early to mid-1870s,* and by 1880 were farming in Hobart Township. In 1884 Henry married Bertha Wischman of Hobart. They had five children, three of whom survived infancy: Herman (born 1887), Elizabeth (1889) and Martin (1894).


Let's start with this photo that has come down to us from Henry:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Fred Ols.

Handwritten notes on the back: "Henry buddies from brickyard (probably Natco)." We don't have a date for this photo. It is printed on postcard with a divided back, but no printer's name or other helpful information.

I am not sure whether Henry is in the photo at all. I don't recognize him, but then again the faces of a few of these men are so blurred their own mothers wouldn't recognize them. Nor do I know whether Henry ever worked in any brickyard. To the census-takers, he gave different occupations: farm laborer (1880), day laborer (1900), carpenter (1910 through 1930).**

So we don't know who these brickies are, but it's a nice brickyard picture.

________________________
*Henry gave different dates to different census-takers.
**The 1920 census is illegible on that point, but it looks as if it might possibly have "carpenter" as his occupation.

Highwaymen of Ainsworth

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the fields of corn, and Alfred Shults came driving — driving — driving — toward Ainsworth in his Ford.

Since his parents, William and Vena Shults, had bought one farm in 1913 and rented another in 1919, I do not know exactly which farm he was heading for when he was set upon by modern-day highwaymen.


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Hobart News 4 Aug. 1921.

This was not an isolated stretch of road, as we know: there were three houses near where present-day Grand Boulevard crosses the Deep River, so if the hold-up men had actually fired their revolvers, the neighborhood would have been roused … which would have been little consolation to Alfred, had they shot him down like a dog on the highway.

Raymond Thompson's Mother

From the steamer trunk.


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Images courtesy of E. Harms.

Handwritten notes on the back of this postcard identify this young lady obliquely:



As it happens, "Raymond Thompson's mother" was Ainsworth's own Elsie Sievert, daughter of Henry and Ida, who became Mrs. Burt Thompson in 1919.

Elsie was born circa 1900. This photo is probably her eighth-grade graduation portrait, dating to about 1914. Minnie Rossow Harms and Elsie were roughly contemporaries, but they would have attended different schools and so perhaps did not know each other until Elsie's son Raymond became friends with the young Harmses — I'm totally speculating here! — which might account for the indirect way Elsie is identified in the notes. Just my wild guess.

Suddenly Violently Insane

In my last post I mentioned the suicide in 1907 of Ida's brother, John Lewin. I don't know why I didn't write about it when I first encountered the story several years ago, except that at the time the names didn't mean anything to me, and also in those days I did not post in such excruciating detail as I do now. But here, at last, is the story, from the Hobart Gazette of December 27, 1907:


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By "a few miles southeast of town," I suspect the writer means Union Township, Porter County. While the microfilm is hard to read, the story gives a name that looks like "Sim Shearer" as the former owner of the farm where all this happened. I can't identify that precise farm, but if you look at Union Township in 1895, you will notice toward the northwest corner a Sam Shearer farm, and a bit south of that the Michael Baessler farm — owned by Michael Sr., I'm guessing, and possibly rented by Michael Jr. as early as the 1900 Census.


… Anyone else out there who (like me) has had their mind warped by reading too many true-crime books? — don't you find yourself wondering about certain aspects of this story? But I will shut up now, since one newspaper article is a very weak foundation on which to build one of my wild theories, and defame an innocent woman.

Ida Lewin Sievert

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From the Hobart Gazette 29 July 1921.

Ida Lewin's parents, Fred and Augusta, were married in 1870 in Germany, and immigrated the next year. All their children were born in the United States. In 1880 the family lived in Chicago, where Fred worked in a foundry, but sometime later the family moved to northwest Indiana and took up farming. Judging by the fact that their children were intermarrying with locals by the mid-1890s, I dare say that if the 1890 census had survived it would record them already here. By 1900 three of their four children had married; and Fred and Augusta were farming in Porter County with the help of their last single child, 16-year-old Louis.

And so in 1896 Ida Lewin had married Henry Sievert and went from farmer's daughter to farmer's wife. I have already traced their subsequent history to some extent in talking about the marriage of their daughter, Elsie. In addition to the mysterious Randhan farm, they also occupied, at various times, a farm south of Ainsworth belonging to Mike Foreman, one near "Pierce's crossing" and one near the "Pierce milk stand." (If those last two were the same farm, which sounds likely, they lived there some seven years, at least.)

Aside from their various moves, the Sieverts show up in my notes only rarely, in reports of innocent sociability or helpfulness. Their only sorrow, it seems, was the loss, mentioned in the obituary, of two children in infancy,* and the suicide of Ida's brother John in 1907.**

The News gave the immediate cause of Ida's death as "heart trouble." In addition to local mourners, her funeral drew at least ten people from Chicago, and two from Milwaukee.

We have a photo of Ida's sister, Hulda, but none of Ida herself.


_________________________
*I can document only one such loss.
**We'll get to this next.


Additional Sources:
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 8 Mar. 1901; 6 Nov. 1903.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 13 Apr. 1917; 29 July 1921.
♦ "Mrs. Henry Sievert, of Near Ainsworth, Passes Away Last Saturday." Hobart News 28 July 1921.

Leslie Halladay

The files at the Hobart Historical Society include a portrait of Leslie Halladay, probably for the same reason as his brother, Charles.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Leslie was born in Indiana in 1885. In 1906 he married Irene Bodanske and by 1910 they had two small daughters. In 1920, Leslie shows up as a member of his parents' household, though still married, while Irene and their three daughters (another was born circa 1915) are listed in a separate household. That suggests a separation, and indeed by 1930 they had divorced. Leslie may have remarried and moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1940 Irene described herself as widowed, and I can find no trace of Leslie.


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index.
♦ WWI Draft Cards.

Orphans

In the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, July 21, 1921, a car carrying two men and two women was speeding north on Broadway in Gary when it slammed into a parked car. The impact sent the woman in the front seat flying through the windshield. Unconscious and critically injured, she was rushed to a hospital. Oddly, no one seemed know her name, only that she lived somewhere "between Hobart and Ainsworth" — or, at any rate, that was the sketchy report that reached the offices of the Hobart News around noon that day. With the paper about to go to press, the staff scrambled to confirm the report and get more information. They failed. The paper came out with no mention of the accident.

The woman died soon after reaching the hospital, without ever regaining consciousness. Her body was taken to the Gary morgue. Gary authorities, having somehow reached a tentative identification, got in touch with a Hobart resident, Jesse Peas, who had just finished a day's work with the EJ&E railroad, and asked him to come to the Gary morgue. He did. There he identified the dead woman as his 31-year-old wife, Carrie.

The next week's Hobart papers printed Carrie's obituary. Hers was a touching story.


(Click on image to enlarge)

As a child, Carrie had been placed in the Julia E. Work Training School in Marshall County, Indiana; and Jesse* in the Rush County Poor Asylum & Orphans Home. Sometime after 1900, Adolph and Augusta Mueller took these two children into their home. The Muellers' only natural child, Bertha, had married Ben Bodamer in 1898, so perhaps they were feeling lonely, and they probably needed help around the farm.

The only census showing the Muellers and Peases together (1910) describes Jesse as a "handman" and Carrie as a "servant." By then Jesse and Carrie had a three-year-old boy, Albert, and had lost one child. This joint household farmed rented land in Winfield Township. Apparently these folks moved around a bit. In 1907 the Adolph Muellers lived on "the Ainsworth-Deepriver road" (probably E. 73rd Ave.). In October 1908 the Gazette reported that "Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Peas who formerly lived west of Deepriver have moved upon a farm near Hebron" — suggesting that the two little families separated for a time.

Adolph Mueller died in May 1914; Augusta in December of that year, at which time her home had been with Jesse and Carrie somewhere south of Ainsworth, "near Deer Creek." In February 1915, Jesse and Carrie moved to Hobart, to "the Dr. Friedrich house on Lillian street." A year and a half later, they had moved to Ainsworth, where Jesse was "working on the railroad" — the Grand Trunk, presumably. The following spring they moved back to Hobart, to "the Gordon house on Lake street." They remained in Hobart, as far as I can tell. Jesse got work in a Gary steel mill for several years before joining the EJ&E railroad.

I'd like to think that this was a story of two orphans, adopted by kindly old folks, finding true love and happiness together for a few precious years. The only thing that puzzles me — and no newspaper had a word of explanation — was why Carrie was running around in Gary at 1:30 a.m. with some man who was not her husband. The driver of the car was George Akers of Gary. Their other companions were Rush Harmon of Gary and Mrs. Myrtle Seeps of Indiana Harbor. Who were these people?

Well, all I can say is that if Carrie had not been behaving exactly as she ought to, I can see plenty in her background that might push a person toward instability: her being orphaned by the age of 9, and becoming a wife and mother by the age of 16; the frequent moves of her household and Jesse's job changes; the loss of a child early on in the marriage, and then the death of her three-year-old daughter from diphtheria in November 1920.

Within a week of the accident, Jesse filed an affidavit against this mysterious George Akers, charging him with manslaughter, alleging that he "did drive a car at a high and unlawful rate of speed and thereby [cause] the death of Mrs. Carrie Pease."

We may learn more from this case.

For now, I'm not sure what Jesse's future holds. I can't find him in the 1930 census. By 1940, he may have remarried and moved back to Rushville.

If Carrie's final resting place remains Crown Hill Cemetery, her grave is unmarked.

______________________________________
*Jesse's surname turns up spelled various ways over the years, including "Pea," "Peas" and "Pease."


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ "Additional Local News." Hobart Gazette 16 June 1916.
♦ Ancestry.com. Lake County, Indiana Index to Birth Records, 1882-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002. Original data: Indiana Works Progress Administration, comp. Index to birth records, Lake County, Indiana, 1882-1920. Crown Point, IN, USA: The Administration, 1938.
♦ "Death of Mrs. Mueller." Hobart Gazette 18 Dec. 1914.
♦ "Funeral of Mrs. Jesse Pease Held at Christian Church Sunday P.M." Hobart News 28 July 1921.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 31 May 1907.
♦ "Identity of Mrs. Pease Not Known Until Thursday Afternoon." Hobart News 28 July 1921.
♦ Indiana WPA Death Records Index.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 16 Oct. 1908; 19 Feb. 1915; 16 Mar. 1917.
♦ "Mrs. Peas Meets Death by Accident." Hobart Gazette 29 July 1921.

Charles Halladay

Probably because Margaret Bullock Killigrew was both an early member of the Hobart Historical Society and a cousin of Charles Halladay, his portrait can now be found in the files of the Hobart Historical Society. He was the son of Josiah and Ruth (Bullock) Halladay, and brother of Louise Halladay Hile.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Charlie was born around 1882. This portrait is undated, but judging by his apparent age I would guess it was taken around 1900. His wife, Caroline or Carrie, was the daughter of Ernest and Henrietta Sohn of Hobart. Charlie and Carrie were married in 1913 (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index), and for him, I believe it was the second or possibly third marriage. The 1920 Census finds them living in Chicago with three children, the eldest eight years old and thus, it would seem, a child of a previous marriage.

"Something Different"

The "Local and Personal" column of the Hobart News of July 21, 1921, was bristling with news of our acquaintances, including George Sauter, who dreamed of "something different" and ended up with an eye-catching red-on-white delivery truck, which would be different from the one we have a picture of.

Charles Halladay was the son of Josiah and Ruth (Bullock) Halladay, thus a nephew and cousin to the local Bullocks.

And a couple more sisters for the mysterious Miss Mary Kipp.


(Click on image to enlarge)

And, speaking of "something different," I just keep reading that Chesterfield ad over and over. I think those guys at the ad agency were smoking something different from Chesterfields.

The Water Tower from the Ground

The water-tower views reminded me that I have a photo of the water tower taken from the ground. Or near the ground.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of E. Harms.

The year was 1947, and even NIPSCO* had caught centennial fever: here we see Eldon Harms, an employee, painting the window frames of the NIPSCO building to make it look nice for the big celebration in July. In the background is the water tower, and you can see a catwalk around it, which was probably where yesterday's water-tower views were shot from.

The water tower is gone now. So is the building Eldon was painting. Only the brick building between them still stands at the east end of Jerry Pavese Park.


Another view of the NIPSCO building and the same employee up the ladder:



_________________________
*I use the name "NIPSCO" loosely. This utility operation may or may not have gone by that name in 1947; eventually it did.

Hobart from the Other Water Tower, 1931

Not the one the librarian climbed, but the new water tower at the east end of what would someday be Jerry Pavese Park. (To see the water tower, look straight up from the first "i" in "Historical" in this circa 1959 photo.) This time, the tower-climber was probably a high-school student, who took these photos printed in the 1931 Aurora yearbook.


(Click on images to enlarge)


The first photo looks eastward along the Nickel Plate tracks. You can see the white steeple of the Unitarian church south of the tracks. I am not sure what that tower is, north of the tracks near the lake — perhaps it's for the police/fire radio, if such a thing existed in 1931?




In the second photo, we see the streetcar barns in the foreground, and then Third Street crossing the lake into the heart of downtown.




The photographer turned more westerly for the third photo. We see Third Street across the foreground, dotted with houses, and beyond it, I believe you can see streets all set out and ready to be built up — Burling Place, Court Street, West 2nd Street …




The fourth photo looks across the lake toward Wisconsin Street. Not much to see!




The last photo takes in the residential area south of downtown Hobart, on the banks of the lake — that is, the area of Water, Lake, 5th, 6th, 7th Streets.

Bliss to Be Back (Paul Too)

The last we heard of Bliss (Shearer) Emery, she had pulled up roots and left Hobart for Chicago, as her husband, Paul, wanted to try his hand at the publishing business and live in the city. Of course, with her family still in Hobart, the Emerys returned for the occasional visit.

It seems that the publishing business disagreed strongly with Paul. Just a few months later he sold his interest in that firm. He and Bliss were still living in the city, but reportedly were considering moving back to Hobart.

By mid-July 1921, they had made up their minds. Bliss was coming back to her old home, and Paul to his old job.


(Click on image to enlarge)

Also, Dr. Dwight Mackey would be making his house calls in a new Oldmobile, just purchased from the Walter Brothers, one of whom was Bliss's brother-in-law.

(And yes, those attending the Gem Theater on Sunday would be seeing Mary Pickford's brother.)



Sources: "Local and Personal." Hobart News 9 June 1921; 14 July 1921; 21 July 1921.

Ainsworth Schoolchildren at Play

At some point in her life, Minnie Rossow Harms got ahold of a big wallpaper sample book and repurposed it as a scrapbook. Using her own homemade paste — a mixture of water and flour — she covered over the wallpaper sheets with photographs, articles cut out of newspapers, airline tickets from visits to her far-away adult children, even her own sketches of houses where she'd lived during her long lifetime. What she didn't paste down she just stuffed between the pages.

She has preserved some wonderful things in there. Unfortunately, between the wet paste causing the photos, etc. to warp, and the overstuffing causing the wallpaper book as a whole to curve, it has become very difficult to reproduce those things for blog postings!

Here is one attempt. Minnie cut this photo of children on the W.G. Haan school playground from an issue of the Gary Post-Tribune (leaving off the date).


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of E.H.

I took a photo of the photo, indoors in poor lighting. Someday I hope to have another go at that scrapbook in better lighting.

From God's House to Men's Houses

(Click on images to enlarge)
Hobart Gazette 24 June 1921.

This is what Joe E. Mellon was offering for sale:



By 1921 this frame building had been moved from Main Street onto the parsonage lawn along Front Street.

Mr. Mellon found a buyer whose name we don't know — just an ordinary man who contributed as best he could to Hobart's long tradition of demolishing its historical buildings.


Hobart Gazette 22 July 1921.


(Happier news of some other acquaintances: John Kegebein already planning to rebuild his burned barn, and Ruth Miller visiting her family on their farm south of Ainsworth.)

Nolte-Wasy Garage and Tool Shed

Somewhere in the woods between the Deep River and Big Maple Lake is the location of these two buildings …


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

… but I don't know where, exactly.

Here is the description from the 1947 property assessment report.



The garage was made of Hobart terra cotta, or so I'm told. (While I have found a concrete foundation out there surrounded by fragments of terra cotta, the foundation looks too small to hold two cars; it might be another terra cotta outbuilding which we shall get to later.) It was built within Louis Nolte's lifetime, as Henry and Louis each had their own car to park in there — a Model T and a Model A, not sure who had which.

Myrtle Mantauk Veal

Walter and Myrtle Veal came to Hobart sometime in 1912, and yet I've seen very little mention of them in the newspapers, until this ominous tidbit in mid-June 1921: "Mrs. Walter Veal is reported quite ill, the result of a nervous breakdown."

Within two weeks she had become too ill to get out of bed; another week, and one of her sisters came up from Logansport to nurse her. Even so, her death on July 21 was "quite sudden and very much unexpected."


(Click on image to enlarge)

(The stepdaughter is mysterious; she was not living with Walter and Myrtle in 1920, and I can't even find out her name.)

When Walter returned to Hobart two days after the funeral in Logansport, his brother and sister came along, to stay with him for a while.

♦    ♦    ♦
From a family broken up, to a family reunited: on July 20, Oliver and Olga (Neef) Bullock arrived in Hobart, to the joy of all the many Bullocks, I'm sure. With their two sons, Robert and Martin, they had sailed from Panama to Norfolk, Virginia, then traveled by train through the coal-mining areas — "an unenviable route," according to the News. They intended to remain until October.


Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 16 June 1921.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 29 July 1921.
♦ "Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Bullock Arrive Here From Panama." Hobart News 21 July 1921.
♦ "Mrs. W.G. Veal Passes Away at Her Home This (Thursday) Morning." Hobart News 21 July 1921.
♦ "Mrs. Walter Veal Dies Suddenly." Hobart Gazette 22 July 1921.
♦ "Obituary." Hobart Gazette 29 July 1921.
♦ WWI Draft Cards.