Another Red Barn

I happened to be in an antique store today and found this photo of a fine-looking farm (with cow grazing in yard) …


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… but what really interested me was the other side, which had a stamped form and handwritten information very similar to the Prochno farm photo.




Just for kicks I looked James Dodd up in the census; in 1920 he was 53 years old, farming his own land in Wall Township, Ford County, Illinois.

Melvin, Illinois is in the next township over — Peachtree Township.

We now conclude this completely irrelevant post.

Lester Fisher, 1901-1922

We had a warning about Lester Fisher's health. The 21-year-old died on the last day of May 1922.


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Hobart News 1 June 1922.

It was tuberculosis that killed him, according to the Gazette.

The Gazette also stated that the family was residing in "the Kramer house on Center street." We do find the Jacob Kramer, Jr. family on Center Street in the 1920 Census, but I can't say whether the Fishers occupied the former Stocker house.


Additional Source: "Death of Lester Fisher." Hobart Gazette 2 June 1922.

Windmill Daredevil

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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

It's a poor photo, but you wouldn't want to ask him to do that stunt twice so you could be sure to get a good shot.

The notes at the bottom tell us that this was Roney Sauter in 1926. I have no idea who Roney Sauter was. Notes on the back tell us that the location is the Prochno farm.

At the base of the windmill, you can see a neat and substantial-looking structure (pump house?). In the photo of the Prochno farm posted earlier, the only pump-house-like structure near the base of the windmill is a ragged wooden shack with a hole in its roof.

That may indicate that the earlier photo dates to before 1926. Or not.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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I don't think it was a happy Thanksgiving for these guys.

But they look like free-range turkeys, don't they? I'd like some free-range turkey.


The postmark is 1961.

It's a Rich Man's Road and a Poor Man's Tax

These notices to Ross Township taxpayers appeared in April 1922:


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Hobart Gazette 14 Apr. 1922.

In view of recent complaints about the condition of local roads, some road improvements would seem necessary and desirable, even if interest-bearing bonds had to be issued to pay for them.

But by late May the protests of some unnamed "Ross Township farmers" had brought a member of the state board of tax commissioners up to from Indianapolis to look into the proposed work. The general objection was that the costs of construction were inflated. With regard to the Woods road, protesters were suspicious of the fact that the wealthy Gary citizens who used the Gary Country Club (at the site of the present-day Innsbrook Country Club) would benefit from the road while not bearing any of its cost.


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Hobart News 1 June 1922.

Perhaps the awarding of the road-work contract to someone who wasn't local didn't sit well with them either.

I gather from the description in this article that the "Sam B. Woods road" to be improved was only five-eighths of a mile long. My guess at its location is marked in red on this excerpt from the 1926 Plat Book:


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The "Goodrich road" improvement area was 2.5 miles "running south and west from Ainsworth on the Lincoln highway" … so, some unspecified chunk of the Lincoln Highway between Ainsworth and Merrillville?


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Hey, I just like making these little maps.

The Prochno Farm

This is the Prochno farm — probably the one on Colorado Street, near the Lester Harms farm.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

You can see the mailbox in front, which would be used by the mail carrier working a Crown Point rural delivery route.

The back of the photo was stamped with blanks to be filled in by hand:



I'm not sure what the purpose of all this was — documentation for insurance purposes? Or perhaps the proud homeowners were ordering a tinted enlargement of this photo to hang on their wall? Anyway, I like the little color details: house white, with green trim and shutters; barn red, with white trim.

There is no date on this.

William Prochno was born in 1880 to Ferdinand and Bertha Prochno, German immigrants. The earliest I can find the family is in 1900, when they farmed rented land in southeast Ross Township. In 1902 William married Louisa Saager. Now, in 1908 the farm that would eventually be the Prochno farm was owned by August Saager, but I don't know what relationship he might have had to Louisa.

The young Prochnos were farming rented land in Eagle Creek Township in 1910. In 1920 they were back in Ross Township, farming what may have been the Saager/Prochno farm (to judge by their neighbors), but the enumerator did not know whether they owned it. They did own it by 1926.

William and Louisa had lost one child in the early years of their marriage. Only their daughter, Mathilda, born circa 1911, survived to maturity. As we know, she married Noland White and then Lester Harms, but neither marriage produced children.


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1908 Plat Map.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.

A Garage at Deep River

As the summer of 1922 approaches, we find the 68-year-old Thomas Strong putting his carpentry skills to work in the village of Deep River … I just wish I knew whose garage it was.


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Hobart News 1 June 1922.

Below that, we learn that the Hubert and Daisy Bullock family (with their recently graduated son, Elmer, and younger son, Cecil)* are leaving my bailiwick, while (in the "Births" column) John Charles Sapper and Vernon Charles Bothwell are entering it. The "Local Drifts" of the June 2 Hobart Gazette noted that Hubert Bullock had already closed up his auto repair shop in Crown Point and moved the family to South Bend. The W.B. Owen family was still in Hobart, but "Mr. Owen has opened a Paige sales station [in South Bend] and spends most of the time there." Hubert Bullock was to be in charge of the Paige service station.

The two other items marked concern the campground in the McAfee woods, along the Yellowstone Trail. Paul Newman felt compelled to warn his fellow citizens that if they mistreated the campground (e.g., by stealing its pump) or the travelers on the Trail, they were giving their town bad publicity nationwide. On a happier note, the Trinity Lutheran school was planning to hold a grand picnic at the campground.

___________________
*In the 1920 Census I find a Chas. Hendricks living in Hubert's household, but the scan on Ancestry.com is not legible enough for me to determine whether he could be Laura's father. Whoever transcribed the page for Ancestry.com read his relationship to Hubert as "brother-in-law," but I don't think that transcription is correct.

A Little Chicken On the Side

Here's Herman Harms sending a playful postcard to Minnie Rossow in October 1914.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.



His use of a phrase known better in its less grammatically correct form — "how's tricks?" — made me wonder when that got started … which led me to a Dictionary of Catch Phrases that has found the phrase in writing as early as 1904.

I can't trace the source of the last sentence in Herman's message.

Ainsworth Then and Now: Chester Cemetery

1963 and 2015



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1963 images courtesy of John Fleck.

The grave markers of Henry Chester and his second wife, Harriet (mother of Daisy Chester Raschka). Those stones look as if they will stand forever.


In the next photo, behind the monument to Amanda, wife of Simeon Marble, we have the graves of (left to right) Henry, Harriet, Mary (Henry's mother), and Charles (Henry's father).




Mary's grave marker now is broken and lying on the ground.


This last one does not show any Chester graves. It was taken towards the west side of the cemetery, furthest from S.R. 51.




Here the cemetery has changed enough that I couldn't figure out how to reproduce the 1963 photo, or if that were even possible.

Elmer Bullock, Crown Point Class of 1922

Elmer Bullock's proud grandmother, along with Mary Kipp and her sisters, went to Crown Point on May 19, 1922, to see him graduate from high school.


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Hobart News 25 May 1922.

Just above that item we hear from the Carlson brothers, Charles and Richard, whom I thought I wrote about earlier … but if I did, I can't find the story now.

Their fruit farm was on the west side of Grand Blvd./S.R. 51, just a part of the 80-acre farm that had belonged to their parents, Swan Peter and Hedvig Carlson. The 1926 Plat Book does not show ownership for the small parcels in that area. We have to go to the 1939 Plat Book to find a parcel with the name Carlson, which seems to be in roughly the right place, but whether it was exactly the location of the 1922 Carlson farm is something I can't tell you.



In the 1920 Census we find the 42-year-old Charles living in that area with his widowed mother, operating a "market garden." Richard, some ten years younger, was then living in Hobart with his wife, but the wording of the news item suggests they had moved to, or near, the farm by 1922.

♦    ♦    ♦
In the right-hand column we read of the loss of another local Civil War veteran, Conrad Bender.


Additional Source: "Death of Conrad Bender." Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

Hobart Class of 1922: Esther Strong

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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Esther was the granddaughter of Thomas and Phoebe Strong. In 1900 her father, Arthur, had married Mary Roper of Hobart (Indiana Marriage Collection). Esther was the oldest of four children. The family ran a dairy farm in southeastern Ross Township, renting land (1920 Census); in 1910 they had occupied "one of Chet Guernsey's farms south of Deepriver" ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 30 Sept. 1910) but may have moved in the 12 years since. Esther had completed the eighth grade at the Deep River schoolhouse ("Ross Township Commencement," Hobart Gazette 18 May 1917).

Esther and her family turned up often in the social news, as they visited family and friends in the area. They had no great tragedies or triumphs.

Maypoles and Gay-Mill Gardens

Tidbits from south of Deep River, late in May 1922:


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Hobart News 25 May 1922.

The list of Ainsworth graduates confirms my earlier guess (which wasn't exactly genius-level in the first place), and gives a few details about the graduation ceremonies — drills and Maypole dances in an open field that may have been a bit muddy.

So Howard H. Smith, who has been living in an undisclosed location at least since January 1922, when Melvin and Verna Guernsey moved onto his farm, is now building a house on his Porter County land? — and where might that be, I wonder?

Excuse me while I look at Union Township maps on a hunch …

… what do you know, it's right across the county line from his Lake County land.


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Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/UnionTownshipMaps.html, courtesy of Steven R. Shook.

♦    ♦    ♦
This advertisement for the Gay-Mill Gardens sounds as if May 27, 1922 might be its grand opening …


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Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

… but if that's the case, then why is the "mirror floor" already famous?

In Dreams of Duneland, Kenneth J. Schoon describes the Gay Mill as "a vibrant dance and social hall with an adjacent hotel and even lakefront houses for rent." It must have seemed quite glamorous to people accustomed to dancing above a blacksmith's shop or in an old schoolhouse, if they ever ventured through the Gay-Mill doors.

Home on Leave

Here's a young sailor doing his best to smile for the camera even though he's freezing.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

This photo of Richard "Dick" Ensign was taken in front of the Ensign home on South Hobart Road. There is no date, but I suspect it was circa 1945, at which time Dick was 20 or 21 years old.

(At left, in the background, is Eldon Harms; at right, Dick's brother, Bob.)


Here he's looking a bit more comfortable.



Notes on the back of the original say it was taken in the summer of 1945. Location unknown. (Insignia unrecognized, but that's not surprising for me. Wouldn't it have been great if he'd gotten to be Ensign Ensign?)

Hobart Class of 1922: Leona Raschka

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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Apparently she had a beau with a "flivver," but whether that beau was Fred Ewigleben, whom she married circa 1924, I do not know.


Her father bought an ad in the annual, of course.

A Triangle, Two Rectangles, and a Little Sunshine

Albert Verplank ventured into the business world of Hobart in May 1922, when he purchased the "triangle" bounded by Main, Center, and Front Streets. The seller's name was given as William Foreman; I assume he was the Hobart William Foreman, not the Ainsworth one. (See "Albert Verplank Buys Triangle of Wm. Foreman For Sum of $2,000," Hobart News 25 May 1922.)


Elsewhere, we find the Scharbach lumber people building large rectangular signs for the McAfee woods campground, one of which will be placed along the Lincoln Highway south of Ainsworth — which makes sense; with that highway being closed for construction, why not send the detoured traffic to the Yellowstone Highway?


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"Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

Two weeks after being stolen, John Killigrew's car is still missing.

I believe the Ed Sauter leaving Gary for South Bend and its Studebakers is Edward Sauter, Jr., now almost 30 years old. I haven't been able to find him in the 1920 Census, but we know he was living and working in Gary when the U.S. entered World War I (WWI Draft Cards).

George and Pearl (Severance) Yager were celebrating the christening of their little "Sunshine," born January 25, 1922.

Hobart Class of 1922: Ruby Fisher

Since I mentioned Lester Quinlan, I ought to mention Ruby Fisher, who was niece and cousin to the Fishers who used to farm in Ross Township.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Ruby had lost her father the previous September.

Forty Years a Veterinarian

The big news on May 19, 1922, was Thomas Casbon's surprising win in a lawsuit stemming from his car wreck at Main and Second …


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Hobart Gazette 19 May 1922.

… but we also learn Mike O'Hearn could remember, forty years later, the exact day on which he began his career as a veterinarian — at which time, if we calculate by his age as given in the 1930 Census, he would have been a mere 20 years old.

And John Killigrew's new car got stolen right outside the county courthouse.


Additional Source: "Thos. Casbon of Valpo Given Verdict of $2,250 Against City of Hobart." Hobart News 18 May 1922.

Hobart Class of 1922: Lester Quinlan

Lester Quinlan wasn't from Ainsworth, but as a Bullock descendant he had enough connection for us to take note of his graduation — as we did for his sister, Vera, in 1920.


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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

He was also a basketball player.

Pump and Circumstance

I don't know what exactly went on to mark the formal re-opening of the McAfee woods campground — a ceremonial installation of the new pump to replace the stolen one?


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Hobart Gazette 12 May 1922.