Walnut Gardens

I have been told by a couple of long-time local residents that the Walnut Gardens (the entertainment venue once managed by Cecil Tonagel) was located on the northeast corner of the intersection of U.S. 30 and 600 W.



According to the county property records, no building in that vicinity is old enough to be part of the original Walnut Gardens, which existed by 1927, and perhaps earlier.


Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso) 19 July 1927.

But then again, as I've said before, the property records don't always tell the story the way you'd expect. Furthermore, I know very little about the Walnut Gardens' history, and nobody actually said any of the present buildings were part of the original Walnut Gardens.

Here's something I find interesting, from the 1921 plat map of Union Township:


From http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Union-1921.jpg, courtesy of Steven R. Shook.

You see two cemeteries circled in red. The southern one is Mosier Cemetery. I don't know the name of the northern one, there at the intersection; but it also appears in the 1928 and 1906 maps. Nowadays, that area is a parking lot. What happened to the people buried there (if indeed there were any)? I suppose they could have been moved to Mosier Cemetery. I hope they weren't just paved over.