Hood Ornaments

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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Eva Thompson is at left, sitting on the car; her mother, Nancy, is at the far right. The other two are unidentified.

There is no date on this photo. In my notes, I wrote: "The car is a Chevy like Lester Dye's"; Eldon Harms must have told me that. But the Ainsworth vintage-car expert tells me that — based on what little he can see of it — he thinks the car might be a 1926 or '27 Dodge. The fashions are consistent with that era.

Eva and Nancy are coatless and hatless, which suggests that they are at home. But the location is unidentified. Behind Nancy is a substantial two-story brick building; that, plus the rolling landscape in the background, tells me that we're not at the old James Chester place east of Ainsworth, where the Thompsons once lived. If I had time, I'd go driving around to look at the land surrounding their other known homes, to see if any combination of home and landscape might resemble this photo. But, of course, I don't have time.

Eva seems to be wearing her "good" clothes. Her dress shines like silk, but I wonder if it could be rayon? My mother, who reached young womanhood in the late 1930s, told me that in her day rayon was looked down upon as "poor man's silk" and you had to be pretty hard up to resort to wearing it. I really don't know how prosperous the Thompson family was. In the same vein, I don't know if Eva's long necklace is made up of real pearls.

At about knee level, her costume gets so complicated: the dress seems to be lined, or maybe that's a slip; and then — bloomers? And stockings held up with pretty lace-edged garters, which she doesn't care if the camera memorializes.

Which leads me to wonder who was operating the camera.

Miss Margaret and the Woodses of Ross Township

I must have been in a bad mood seven years ago when I wrote the post about Samuel B. Woods: I put so little effort into it. Now Sam's youngest child is getting married, so maybe I should take this opportunity to educate myself a bit more.


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"Local and Personal," Hobart News, Nov. 1, 1923.

The home of the bride's parents was stood, according to A Pictorial History of Merrillville, "on West 57th Avenue, near the intersection of 57th and Cleveland Street (Route 55)." That certainly helps me figure out which of the various parcels owned by the Woodses was where they actually lived.


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From the 1908 Plat Map.

Samuel Bartlett Woods was born in Ross Township in 1856 to Bartlett and Ann Eliza Woods. Bartlett Woods was among the early settlers of Ross Township and a prominent citizen; you can read more about him in Lake County Encyclopedia. Ann Eliza Sigler, who became Bartlett's wife in 1847 (Indiana Marriage Collection), was the daughter of Samuel and Ann Sigler, early settlers of Hobart Township.

In 1882, Samuel Woods married Mellue Vilmer.[1] They had three children. The first was a son, Harold, who died in 1908. The second was a daughter, Wilma, who married Francis Malmstone in 1915 and lived with him in Griffith. The last was our Miss Margaret.

Now, Chester Clark and his new wife may have spent some of their early married life on his "large farm" at Carthage, Illinois, but we know from the 1930 Census that within seven years they moved back to live on her parents' farm.

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At the top of the right-hand column on the page above, we find another happy event: at the farm on Cleveland Avenue, Lois Harms turned eight years old. Esther Palm was a neighbor; Ruth and Loretta Schavey were maternal relatives, I'm sure, but I don't know their exact relation.

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Lower down in that same column, another item that interested me was A. Johnson's public sale "at the old Collver place." I've just barely mentioned the name of Collver and identified the Collver property without understanding precisely where it was …


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Image from the 1908 Plat Map.

… and now I'm going to try to figure that out. When I wrote the linked post, in 2015, the Lake County Surveyor GIS website may not even have been online — or if it was, my internet connection was not good enough to use it. But now I can use it, and do, and it's very helpful.

Anyway, we can see from the plat map above that the Collver place was bordered on the south by South Side Addition 2. Per the Lake County GIS, South Side Addition 2 is a strip of land running along the north side of 13th Street, from S.R. 51 east to just past Fleming Street (now occupied by a commercial building and several houses). And we have a pretty good idea where the Sapper land was and still is, don't we? So the Collver place was between the Sapper land and South Side Addition 2. Just north of South Side Addition 2 is a cute little house, built in 1919 per the county records, that must have stood on the old Collver place, and was probably occupied by this A. Johnson — maybe even by the Collver family.

And who was the Collver family? The member we're dealing with today — the auctioneer at this public sale — was born Sylvanus Roy Collver in Canada in 1873, but always went by Roy or S.R. He came to the U.S. sometimes around 1890[2], following his father, mother, and brother. In 1900, the family was living in Chicago. Roy was a fruit salesman. In January 1896 Roy had married Margrete Prendergast (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index); in June of that year they had a son, whom they christened Sylvanus Albert.

Since Roy was in his early twenties when he married Margrete, that was probably his first marriage. It wasn't his last. I don't know what happened to Margrete, but by 1905 Roy was free to marry Mary M. O'Donnell (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index). I think she is the "Mae" who shows up with him the 1910 Census, living in Hobart Township, in their own home. In January 1917, Roy sued Mae for divorce.[3] The divorce must have gone through: in May 1917, Roy married Leah Herman (Indiana Marriage Collection). I can't find them in the 1920 Census, and Roy didn't live to be counted in the 1930 Census. He was still married to Leah when he died in 1927 (Indiana Death Certificates).


I cannot identify the A. Johnson who started all this by having a public sale on the old Collver place.


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[1] I believe that her brother, William E. Vilmer, was a local photographer.
[2] 1893 per the 1900 Census; 1889 per the 1910 Census.
[3] "In the Divorce Courts," Hobart Gazette, January 19, 1917.

Two Rescued Soda Bottles

With untold courage and at great risk to my personal safety,[1] I rescued two old soda bottles from the eroding bank of a creek that flows into the Deep River. A hollow bottle-shaped impression in the bank showed that a third had already fallen into the water and been swept away.

The first bottle has no label. It is covered in an embossed ropelike design:


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The lettering on the bottom of the bottle reads: "DESIGN PAT'D MAR. 3, 25/C 889/Duraglas/9 [symbol] 5/I."

Googling that patent date for a soda-bottle design brings up images of Nehi soda bottles, including ones nearly identical to this bottle. So I'm pretty sure this is a Nehi bottle. Apparently bottle collectors call these embossed ropes the silk-stocking design. What little history I can turn up on Nehi suggests that this bottle dates between 1925 and 1955.


The second bottle still has most of its painted label:





There is lettering on the bottom, but nothing informative.



A capital G inside a square, and then: "320/1/CONTENTS 10 FL. OZ."

Here's a Waverly advertisement from the Hammond Times of March 20, 1952:



The soda was manufactured and distributed by the Superior Beverage Company, 226 E. 21st Street, Gary, Indiana. The Superior Beverage Company building is still standing there …


Image from Google street view.

… or at least it was in the summer of 2019, when the Googlemobile went through.

A couple of urban explorers put a video on YouTube of themselves exploring the derelict building, but they didn't find anything interesting.


That's all the creek-bank archeology I have for now.

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[1] I might have gotten my feet wet.

Unidentified Newlyweds, But I Have a Theory

For Valentine's Day, here's a lovely photo of two unidentified newlyweds.


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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

It comes from Minnie Rossow Harms' steamer trunk, which narrows the circle of possibilities.

I think the young man looks like Henry Harms, Jr. That would make the young lady the former Miss Grace Cook.

Here's an identified photo of Henry Jr. and another young woman (named Lena Clark):


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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Cute, huh? "To Reno," because Reno, Nevada was known as a place where you could get divorced relatively quickly? — not very romantic. But you could get remarried the same day, apparently.

However, the point of the photo is: the Reno-bound Henry Jr. looks to me like the unidentified young husband above.


Although the newlyweds are not identified, their photographer is. He was T.E. Wood, of 6250 Wentworth, Chicago, Illinois. We know that Henry Jr. and Grace were married January 8, 1916; was Mr. Wood working as a photographer then? The 1910 Census shows Thomas E. Wood, at age 70, carrying on his profession while living at 6250 Wentworth. A 1911 Chicago directory, while advertising his photography business, also gives us his middle name: Evert.


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From The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago 1911 (Chicago: The Chicago Directory Company, 1911), https://archive.org/details/lakesideannualdi1911unse/page/n3/mode/2up.

Mr. Wood died May 22, 1918. His brief death notice in the Chicago Tribune of May 23 doesn't say whether he was photographing to the end.

Chicago directories between 1911 and 1918 are remarkably scarce online, so I can't prove T.E. Wood was still working as a photographer in 1916. However, he seems to have been devoted to his art, and it's not unreasonable for a man of some 76 years of age to photograph a nice, orderly event like a wedding. I hereby pronounce my theory plausible.

The Ewigleben Family

Back when I was posting about the Ewiglebens, I completely forgot I had this photograph.


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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Fred Ewigleben, Sr., is standing at center, and his wife, Tillie (née Blanchard) is seated in front of him. The photo is undated, but based on the fact that it was taken by the Hallberg Studio, as well as the fashions and apparent ages of the subjects, I'm guessing it dates to about 1920. Per the 1920 Census, Fred and Tillie had four children: Raymond (19), Fred Jr. (17), Emil (15), and Florence (13). Emil and Florence are seated on either side of their mother; the older boys are standing on either side of their father, but I don't know which is which. [2/18/2020 update: Thanks to Rita McBride of the Hobart Historial Society and an Ewigleben descendant, we now know that Fred Jr. is the young man standing at right. Raymond is standing at left.]

I'm having trouble sketching out Tillie's family background. Per her death certificate from 1946 (she died on November 21, her birthday), she was born in Chicago in 1875; her father's name is given as Charles Blanchard, but the informant apparently did not know her mother's maiden name — not even her first name. There was a Charles Blanchard in Hobart who was near Tillie's age and also born in Chicago, but his death certificate gives his father's name as John, mother's name unknown. Where the information in both cases was so lacking about the decedent's ancestry, I'm not inclined to rely too much on the death certificates. I think it's highly likely that Charles Blanchard, Sr. (he also had a son named Charles) was Tillie's brother.

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2/15/2020 update — I came across this item in the "Local Drifts" column of the Hobart Gazette of January 24, 1919:

Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Blanchard and Mr. and Mrs. Fred Ewigleben were in Chicago the forepart of the week to attend the funeral on Monday of Mrs. Anna Carleton, a sister of Mr. Blanchard and Mrs. Ewigleben. Mrs. Carleton is survived by husband, a daughter and three sons, one of whom is in France.

That establishes Tillie and Charles Sr. as siblings. The Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index gives Anna Carleton's parents' names as John Blanchard and W. Russell. The three Carleton sons were Harold, Adolph, and William, and the daughter, who was about 12 when Anna died, was named Eva (1910 Census) or Eveline (1920 Census).

Charles Goldman Hits the Big Time

It's the autumn of 1923 and our former storekeeper, Charles Goldman, has well and truly shaken the dust of Ainsworth from his feet as he now moves to Gary to become a real estate mogul.


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Hobart News, Nov. 1, 1923.

Their nieces were still living with them, and doing well, it seems:


"Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, Nov. 9, 1923.

701 Connecticut is a vacant lot now.

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The page from the November 1 News, above, includes a "Births" column that shows the population of Ainsworth increasing.



The boy born to Otto and Louise (Buhr) Foreman would be named Leroy. His father had also been born in Ainsworth. A descendant tells me that Louise Buhr was from Illinois (the 1910 Census shows her living with her family in the village of Beecher, Will County); if I remember the story right, she was visiting in Indiana in 1922 and met Helmuth and Otto Foreman, who happened to be looking for someone to keep house for them after the death of Mary Mau Foreman. So Louise came to Ainsworth as the Foremans' housekeeper, then she and Otto fell in love and were married on June 10, 1923 (per this descendant; I can't find the record on Ancestry.com). In October, along came Leroy. You do the math.

The other Ainsworth baby in this "Births" column was little Leroy's cousin — John Fasel had married Anna Foreman, Otto's sister, in 1916 (Indiana Marriage Collection). Their Halloween baby would be named Marie. We've already seen a photo of her as a schoolgirl.