A Mystery House

Since my previous post talked about the Saager family, I thought I'd post this unidentified photo from the Lester Harms collection that somehow relates to them.


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

As farmhouses go, it's modestly pretty, and typical enough to be anybody's. The only evidence linking it to the Saagers is what's written on the back of the photo:



We know who August Saager was. And we know that the August Saager farm eventually became the William Prochno farm, of which we have a photo. From what I can see of the house in that photo, though, it does not look like the house in our mystery photo.

And I don't know who on earth H. Jaeger was. Of course, I immediately thought of the Ainsworth-area Yager/Jaeger family, but there was no H. among them. The house in the photo looks a bit like the old Yager house still standing on 73rd Avenue — assuming some remodeling — but, again, that temple-and-wing style was so often used in houses in this area. And the mystery house appears to sit very close to the road, unlike the Yager house.

There is a long blank in the history of the Saager/Prochno land (1874-1908), during which someone named H. Jaeger might have lived there — but as I noted before, the mystery house does not resemble the Prochno house. I can't identify any H. Jaeger in the census records in Lake County around the turn of the 20th century.

It seems that the H. Jaeger house was somehow important to August Saager. From general appearances, the photo seems to date to the late 19th or early 20th century — a time when photography was not the simple process it is now and may have required the services of a professional. And then the photo was mounted on a decorative cardboard frame like a family portrait, someone wrote both names on the back, and the photo was preserved all these years.

It's a mystery to me.

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1/18/2020 update: I believe that Rachel has identified H. Jaeger (see the Comments to this post), and the house where he lived in 1918 (per his draft card), 2239 W. 15th Ave. in Gary, is still standing, and only slightly remodeled.

The only mystery remaining is why that house was so important to August Saager.