New Year's Greetings for 1910

On December 30, 1909, two sisters sent out New Year's greetings from Hobart.


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The senders were Mrs. Evea Miller and her younger sister, Miss Etta Darling.

Evea had married Jesse Miller in 1905, in Kosciusko County, Indiana, where the Darling family lived at the time. Shortly after that, the remaining Darlings moved permanently to South Bend, whence they traveled to Hobart in 1909 for this holiday visit with Evea and Jesse, as both postcards mention.

The 1910 Census shows Jesse (27) and Evea (22) living on Lillian Street with their first child, a two-year-old named Floyd. Jesse is described as an "operator" for an unnamed railroad — probably the Pennsy, if he had to hike to Liverpool every day (as Evea says in her postcard message). Their Lillian-Street neighbors apparently included Lewis Barnes and Rose Hendrix Gilpin.

It was probably Jesse's railroad job that brought them to Hobart. Neither had any previous local connection that I can find, or any subsequent either. By 1920 they had relocated to Warsaw, Kosciusko County, Indiana, which became their permanent home. Both Jesse and Evea are buried there.

Bladensburg, Ohio (where Etta was sending her postcard), was where her and Evea's father, Otto Darling, had been born in 1863 and where he married Stella Mason in 1885. The family moved to Indiana by 1900.

In 1911 Etta married a man named Clyde Carr in South Bend. There they lived out their lives and raised their three daughters, and both are now buried in South Bend's Highland Cemetery.

Keep On Keepin' On

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It's been a while since I've been able to get any photos from a stopped train blocking State Road 51 and inconveniencing dozens of people. Keep on keepin' on indeed.


Do not look at this:



…The train had started moving again when I shot that one.



This little guy looks so happy:





One of these days, a freight train is going to derail in my back yard and kill me.

'Tis the Season to Get a Nagging Cough

In addition to Uncle Dan's meat-curing recipe, the 1907 Methodist cookbook at the Merrillville/Ross Township Historical Society museum includes a handwritten recipe for cough syrup. The ingredients include pressed horehound, water, sugar, lemon juice, and licorice.


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Image courtesy of the Merrillville/Ross Township Historical Society.

This recipe leaves me with questions. First of all, what form did "pressed horehound" take? The directions — to boil it until "all the strength is out," then strain — suggest that we're dealing with dried herbs rather than a "cold-pressed" liquid infusion. Secondly, where did the pressed horehound come from? — was it commercially prepared and bought at the local store, or did the family grow the horehound in their garden and press it themselves? Did you pay a visit to the old lady down the street, who always had herbs on hand? Or did people normally have this stuff lying around in their pantries?

The "5¢ licorice piece" was evidently bought at the local store. Licorice has a history of medicinal use, but a lack of "high-quality evidence" to support such use. Horehound has a similar history, with a similar lack of scientific support.

Now I wonder, if the person making this concoction had to go to the grocery store anyway to get the two lemons, the licorice and/or the horehound, why didn't they just buy a pre-made patent cough syrup? But then I have to remind myself that — first, it may have been cheaper to prepare the syrup at home, and secondly, if you buy all the ingredients yourself, at least you know what's in the final product. When this cookbook was printed, the Pure Food and Drug Act was still in its infancy, having been passed in 1906. Your ordinary citizen of Merrillville in 1907 may have been aware of that buying a bottle of patent medicine was a roll of the dice.

And then, too, I suppose that when you go to all the trouble of putting these ingredients together and boiling them down to a syrup, you feel as if you are really doing something for the poor suffering cougher, even it's that cougher is yourself. The power of the placebo effect might extend to the person making the syrup as well as the person taking it: "You're coughing less now, dear." "Why, yes (cough, cough), that's true!"

Puppy Break

I have a foster puppy this week.


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Hmm, should I research Ainsworth history, or play with my foster puppy?



Sorry, Ainsworth.

Chester's Grove

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for trees.

The Lake County Parks people have been very busy lately around Big Maple Lake, and now the old Chester place has a grove of saplings in what used to be the back and side yard.


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There is an interesting variety of trees: Kentucky Coffee Tree (I don't know much about trees, I just read the labels):



This one is Black Cherry:



And this is Ohio Buckeye:



And Pin Oak:



In another ten or twenty years, I expect, Chester's Grove will be lovely.

Along the gravel road that leads back of the lake, they have planted some Cucumber Trees. I am looking forward to seeing how those turn out.


In other tree news, I discovered a little volunteer oak sapling in my field. From the looks of it, I had run over it with my brush mower last spring (maybe the spring before, too), not even realizing it was there. But now I have marked it so I will never run over it again.

The Farm Under the Big Boxes

Standing at the intersection of U.S. 30 and Colorado street today and looking west, you see a vast expanse of asphalt surrounding big-box stores such as Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot, as well as restaurants and gas stations. Thousands of vehicles pass through the intersection, day and night. The parking lots are never empty. The lights never go out.

You can hardly imagine those hundred-plus acres as quiet farmland. You can hardly imagine U.S. 30 ending there, either; and yet all the maps we have show the road that is now U.S. 30 going no further east than Colorado, until the new Lincoln Highway came through in the mid-1930s.

I have been researching that area because the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society received an inquiry about the farm that once lay there — specifically, the farm of Frank and Catherine Willy, which comprised approximately 115 acres on the west side of Colorado Street, cut in half by the road that is now U.S. 30.

Here is my attempt to outline the Willy farm on the modern-day Google satellite view:


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Image from Google.com.

This farm, under various owners, had retained nearly the same dimensions for over a century. The earliest record I can find of it comes from the NWIGS' Early Land Sales, Lake County: on October 18, 1852, Harmon Underwood bought a total of 160 acres.[1] On January 11, 1854, those 160 acres became the property of John Underwood, who I believe was Harmon's son.[2]

Sometime between 1854 and circa 1874, the farm lost 40 acres on the west, as we can see on the 1874 Plat Map:


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The new owner of those 40 acres, P.A. Banks, was probably Parley A. Banks. You can also see that H[armon?] Underwood owned another 200 acres east of the original farm.

And lastly, you can see that the mapmaker has clearly drawn a road from the west up to what is now Colorado Street, but eastward of that point, there is no trace of a road.

The 1891 Plat book does not include Section 23, so next we have to jump forward to 1908. Now we find the farm owned by Mary Burge.


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We also find the parcel reduced in size by almost five acres, taken, I believe, by the Chicago, Cincinnati & Louisville (later Chesapeake & Ohio) Railroad, which began buying up right-of-way through Ross Township circa 1903.

My best guess as to the identity of Mary Burge is that she was a daughter of Julius and Nancy Demmon and married Winfield Scott Burge in 1878. The 1900 Census shows Winfield and Mary, with numerous children, living on their own farm in Ross Township in the general area of Colorado and U.S. 30 (to judge by their neighbors). Mary died in 1922. By the mid-1920s the farm had been sold: we find a new owner in the 1926 Plat Book.


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I cannot identify Caroline Schwer.

In 1932 the farm changed hands again. I will let the new owner tell the story of how that came about, as he told it to his descendants:

Three Ears of Corn

by Frank Anthony Willy

After Frank and Catherine were married, they moved onto a farm in Dyer, Indiana, which Frank rented from his father August. Besides charging rent, August required his son to hire his brothers to work the farm. This was a difficult situation at best for Frank and Catherine. During the Depression they had little money to spend and Frank's brothers were teenagers, with poor work ethics. Eventually Frank and Catherine realized that they could no longer afford to rent the farm in Dyer. They knew they would have to go out on their own and start a new life away from Frank's family.

Frank set out to visit three farms that were for sale nearby. The first was in Wisconsin. The ears of corn in the fields were large and well-formed and the house was well built with a natural spring underneath that could be used to keep food cold. This farm, he thought, would be an excellent choice.

The second farm he visited was in Illinois. Once again, the corn in the field was large, showing that the soil had been well taken care of. The outbuildings and home were also in excellent shape. He believed this would be a good farm to own.

Lastly, Frank visited a farm for sale in Indiana. This corn was just "nubbin."[3] The soil seemed to be spent, with most of the nutrients used long ago. The farm and its buildings were neglected and in very poor shape. As he took pictures of this farm he thought, "This is a very poor farm. It would be difficult to make a go of it here." As Frank returned to Catherine to tell her of his trip, his heart was heavy. He laid an ear of corn from each farm in front of her and then began to cry, for he knew the only farm they could afford was the neglected one in Indiana. And so it came to pass, that in 1932, Frank and Catherine Willy moved their family of eight and all they owned to the neglected Indiana farm with "nubbin" corn. Little did either of them realize what an excellent choice it would turn out to be.

(Story courtesy of Nick Hopman.)

Frank was then about 35 years old, Catherine (née Alber) about 32. They had been married in 1920.

Frank mentions taking photos of the farm when he first visited it. That may be the source of these two photos of the farmhouse and barn.


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This and the following image courtesy of Nick Hopman.



Again, thanks to Nick Hopman, we have Frank Willy's own story about the early days on the farm, and what the construction of the new Lincoln Highway did for the family:

You kids first went to St. Peter and Paul's School. I had to drive you. But when I had no money to buy gas, I sent you to the Ainsworth school as the bus passed our house. The first day you came home you said you needed about $14.60 for books. Had to sell corn for $.12 a bushel. Had about $.60 over on that truckload. That shows you what the Great Depression was like. I did not sell any more, as Henry Bloom[4] said, "Don’t sell. I will go along with you if it takes ten years. I won't foreclose on the mortgage!" The mortgage was for $7,000. The next year we had the cinch bugs. Twenty acres of corn barely filled my little silo. The next year we had the great dust storm. Steady wind from the southwest. In Kansas the dust covered fences and buildings. People left their farms. We bit our lips and held on.

Had 12 acres of fine wheat. Wanted to cut it on Monday. Henry Bloom was out on Saturday. "You ought to cut it. Sometimes it don't pay to wait 'til it has fully ripe." Sunday night it hailed. Shocked everything flat. Holes in the tarpaper roofs. Cut off branches of trees. It was a quarter-inch thick on the ground. I raked the wheat field and got Hank Homeier[5] to come and thrash it. Blew the straw into the barn and got 60 bushels of wheat. I needed that straw. Also paid Koehler[6] $10 so I could cut some slough grass, and Old Nick (our hired hand) herded the cattle there. In 1934 the new highway (US 30-the Lincoln Highway) came through. Then I had it made. When US 30 road work was being done I rented a small area to the state for material storage. When the work was done, instead of having the state clean up the storage area by removing the remaining sand, gravel, and steel, I negotiated to do it myself, for a price of course. But instead of cleaning up the mess, I just sold the materials until they were gone.

For some reason, the 1939 Plat Book fails to show the new highway east of Colorado:


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But the 1939 aerial view shows it clearly:


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Image from https://igws.indiana.edu/IHAPI/Map/.

This raises the question whether the 1874 cartographer just made a mistake about the road extending east of Colorado, and that mistake was perpetuated by subsequent map-makers who didn't bother to investigate for themselves. But I am going to ignore that possibility because it's just no fun at all.

Anyway, the 1950 Plat Book shows the new U.S. 30:


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As you can see from the 1939 aerial view above, the Willys' house and farm buildings stood on the west side of Colorado Street, north of U.S. 30. This photograph shows more clearly how the buildings were arranged in relation to Colorado Street, which runs diagonally across the bottom of the photo:


Image courtesy of Nick Hopman.


Frank and Catherine Willy farmed that land for 30 years, through the Great Depression, through World War II, and beyond. Their children grew up, moved out, started families of their own. Frank and Catherine bought a modern ranch house in the Green Acres neighborhood. In 1962, they sold their farm.

Here is the former Willy farm as it appears in the 1972 Plat Book:


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The new owner probably rented most of the land to locals who were still in the farming business.

This 1978 aerial view from the Lake County GIS website shows that the farmhouse and outbuildings have been removed, and some kind of business is operating in the northwest corner of the U.S. 30/Colorado intersection:


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The 1990s brought the era of the big-box store, and the landscape of the old farm was utterly transformed.


_______________
[1] He bought the south half of the northeast quarter, and the north half of the southeast quarter.
[2] Cf. Lake County Encyclopedia, p. 80. I'm a bit confused.
[3] "Nubbin" — a small or imperfect ear of corn [per the author].
[4] We don't know for certain who Henry Bloom was. My best guess is Henry Blume (1867-1958), who shows up in the 1910 Census farming his own land in Center Township, but in all subsequent censuses he gives no occupation. He and his wife, Mary, had only one child, who died in 1920.
[5] I think this was Henry Homeier, who farmed northeast of Merrillville.
[6] I give up.

The Maples on the Old Chester Place

I stopped by the old Chester place late yesterday afternoon to photograph the lovely foliage of the maples there.

This shot would have been impossible a year ago, when the house was still standing:


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Looking east along Ainsworth Road:




The side yard, and the setting sun shining through the leaves:




The back yard, looking toward Big Maple Lake:




Maybe someone who actually knows something about trees can tell me if any of those are old enough to have been planted by a Chester. Maybe they are the Wasy trees, I don't know.

How Uncle Dan Cured His Ham

I found this handwritten "receipt" for curing ham and bacon in a cookbook printed in 1907 by the Merrillville Methodist Ladies Aid Society.


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Image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Here's my transcription:

To 100 lbs of meat take 8 lb. salt. 4 lbs. C or light brown Sugar. 4 oz. Salt-peter. Disolve saltpeter in about 1 gill hot water pour over the above, mix all well in a wooden tub or large Bucket
Rub hams and shoulders thouroly 3 times about 3 days apart, bacon 2 times, lay on incline board and let drip into tub holding salt & sugar
Ready to smoke in 10 to 15 das.
Brine in tub O.K. for the pickle pork. Pack meat in cool place in barn or granery in paper flour sacks in Boxes or Barrel with Oats

First of all, I like Uncle Dan's use of that old measuring term, "gill," meaning one-fourth of a pint or about four fluid ounces.

I do not know what "C" meant with regard to the type of sugar.

Saltpeter is potassium nitrate, a preservative.[1]

So, after 10 to 15 days of this treatment, you can smoke your 100 pounds of meat. (I wish the writer had included the details of how Uncle Dan did that.) Then you pack away your smoked meat, wrapped in paper flour sacks in a box, or layered with oats in a barrel.

And then, if I understand correctly, you use the leftover salt-sugar-saltpeter mixture in the tub (now seasoned with the liquid from the ham or bacon that has run down the incline board) to pickle additional pork. The necessity of food preservation is the mother of some pretty awful culinary inventions. But I suppose if your choice is pickled pork or nothing at all, you're going to eat pickled pork, and be glad you have it.


And, finally, I have no clue who Uncle Dan was.


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[1] And also an ingredient of gunpowder. I came across an interesting article about saltpeter here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-you-asked/what-saltpeter-used-and-it-true-it-reduces-certain-carnal-urges

Mr. and Mrs. Johann Christian Traugott Erfurth, Just Passing Through

Now let's get back to the northern 40 acres of the Harms 73rd Avenue farm. We left off in 1870, at which time ownership of those 40 acres was transferred from Charles Smith to Albert Van Doozer. Charles' parents, Jacob and Hannah, may or may not have still been leasing the land and farming it themselves.

Five years later, it appears that the elder Smiths had no further want of the land, for whatever reason that may have been. On New Year's Day, 1875, Albert and Emma Van Doozer sold the land to someone named Johann Christian Traugott Erfourth.


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Images courtesy of the Eldon Harms family.

Johann aka John, and his wife, Eliza Rosalia, borrowed the money to purchase the land from one Emma P. Smith …



… who was, I'm guessing, the daughter of Luther and Sarah Smith. If my guess is correct, Emma was about 20 years old (born circa 1855 per the 1860 Census). I do not know where a 20-year-old would get $500 to lend out, unless she inherited it from her mother, or perhaps a grandparent (we know that both her grandparents were dead by September 1877). I have not been able to find out anything about Emma's life after her father's estate was distributed, beyond the fact that she became an orphan in 1871.

The surname of the purchasers has already appeared in two different spellings: Erfourth and Erfurth. Later it shows up as Ehrfurth. Even with all those options I cannot identify Johann and Eliza in any other record, such as a census, that would give us details about them.

A lien search two years later (when the Erfurths were selling the land) showed that Johann had been active enough, during the previous ten years, to be involved in a couple of lawsuits:



That first lawsuit, Ehrfurth v. Kline, might have involved an Ainsworth-area Kleine/Kline, but without a first name we can't know.

The second lawsuit, Steinfeld v. Ehrfurth & Bommerschein, tells us that the Erfurths were in business with a Martin Bommerschein — but I can't find any information about him, either. Nor can I identify this Steinfeld person who sued them.

So this episode in the history of the Harms 73rd Avenue farm is a big "I don't know."

Finally, in 1878 — several months after the Erfurths had sold the land — Emma Smith released the mortgage on it.




I just have to add that I think "Traugott" is an interesting name. It means "trust in God."

Ipsilon Dart

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This Ipsilon Dart can't believe how busy I've been lately. Where does the time go? wonders this Ipsilon Dart.

The Aurelia Building in Gary

I don't usually deal with Gary history, because it's a huge topic and there are thousands of people better qualified to talk about it, but this lovely structure has an Ainsworth connection.


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Image courtesy of David Conley.

It was built by Teofil H. Grabowski, and named for his daughter, Aurelia. We can assume that the building went up sometime after Aurelia's birth in September 1922; that's as exact as I can get at this point.

It stood on the north side of West Fifth Avenue in the 900 block. In addition to office space, it held apartments: for example, the dentist whose sign we can see on the nearest corner, Samuel De Haven, appears in the 1930 Census in a rented residence at 902 West Fifth, and his office is listed at the same address in a 1929 city directory.[1] In the same directory, Dr. Sophie Solf is listed at 914 W. Fifth. The awning of the Fifth Avenue Restaurant gives its street number as 904.

I'm guessing the photo dates to roughly 1929 (although some of the businesses in the photo are not listed in the 1929 directory).[2]

The Aurelia Building is no longer standing. My source tells me that family members saw it as late as (approximately) 1967 as they were driving through the region. According to Lake County records, the Rally's restaurant now on the site was built in 1989. A few years after that, Aurelia Grabowski Conley came to the area for a brief visit and found her namesake building replaced, but she did get to visit her childhood home north of Ainsworth.


_______________
[1] Polk's Gary (Indiana) City Directory 1929. Chicago: R.L. Polk & Co., 1929. Via Ancestry.com.
[2] Ainsworth's own vintage-car expert tells me that he can't see anything inconsistent with that approximate date in the vehicles on the street.

Tressy's Secret

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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

When a stranger named Mandy Haggerty contacted me out of the blue to tell me that her grandfather was Theresia Chester's illegitimate child, I was astonished. Tressy? Who would ever have thought…?

But the birth certificate is easy enough to find, if only I had known to go look for it. I wonder that I did not stumble across it before in all these years of research.


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Image from Ancestry.com.

The father, George Peterson, was born December 24, 1888, somewhere in Wisconsin (sources vary). His parents, Danish immigrants, were farmers (1900 Census, and I am relying on Mandy's research for his background, since a guy with a name like George Peterson — well, you have to have a special interest in him to do the work of separating him from all the other George Petersons). At about 20 years of age George married for the first time and had a child; the 1910 Census shows him living in Chicago with his in-laws. I do not know what became of that marriage. George somehow found his way down to Ross Township. When the Great War broke out and he had to complete his draft card on June 5, 1917, he described himself as single (WWI Draft Cards). He was working as a hired hand on the farm of Nicholas Fleck, Jr.

Living in Ross Township, he not surprisingly came to know Tressy Chester. She was about ten years his junior.

What is surprising about this episode is that throughout the late autumn of 1917, and the winter and spring of 1918, none of the local papers mentioned a word about Charles Chester's taking any legal action against his daughter's seducer — or even illegal action, as might be the first impulse of the hot-headed Charles.

To his credit, Charles apparently did not do anything against his pregnant daughter, either. It was probably under his roof, on May 14, 1918, that George Jr. was born. As noted on the birth certificate, George Sr. was then residing back in his home state, Wisconsin.

We have no way of knowing how Tressy felt about giving her child up for adoption. The fact that birth certificate recorded a name rather than just "baby boy" would suggest emotional attachment — but I ought not to subject Tressy to my amateur psychologizing.

At that time and place, of course, her keeping the child as a single mother would have come at a very heavy social cost. As to letting her parents raise the child as their own — as the Ols family had done with little Lela — well, Charles and Constance were both about 46 years old at that time; I suppose they could have brazened it out if they'd really wanted to. But that didn't happen.

The child having been adopted out, Tressy's life resumed all appearance of normality. As we know, in September 1919 she married Robert Shaw. The ceremony took place in Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. The bride wore white crepe de chine and was attended by her sister, Jennie.[1]

Our knowing what we know now makes it all the more poignant that the first child of that marriage, a little boy names James, died shortly after birth (Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index). Robert and Tressy went on to have two more sons whom they raised to adulthood.

I wonder if Robert knew about Tressy's first child?

The Chesters kept quiet about it all even within the family, it seems. In contrast to the Ols descendants, to whom the story of Jennie and Lela was just a part of family history, none of the Chester descendants I'm in touch with knew anything about Tressy's secret. The story was equally unknown among the descendants of Tressy's baby. Mandy Haggerty needed an Ancestry.com DNA test, with its suggestions of possible relatives, as well as the help of a "search angel," to figure out that the grandfather she knew as Donald Robert Haggerty had come into the world as George Peterson, Jr.

I will talk about him and his adopted family in a future post.

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[1] "Hobart," The Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 Sept. 1919.

Collared Dart and Bristly Cutworm. Maybe.

Here's a bad moth pic, taken with my phone.


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I think it might be Collared Dart, but I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.


Here's an even worse pic of a different moth.



The only thing I can find in my Peterson Field Guide to Moths that looks like it is the Bristly Cutworm moth.

Frederick and Fredericke

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Fredericke and Frederick Suhr. Images from findagrave.com.

Returning to the Harms 73rd Avenue farm, we left off in 1873 when Mary Chester bought the lower forty of the 80-acre parcel.

In September 1874, Mary lost her husband, Charles. In November, she sold her 40 acres to a German immigrant family by the name of Suhr, lending them $921 of the $1,000 purchase price.


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Image courtesy of the Eldon Harms family.

I did not recognize that name at first, but I should have: from the early days of this blog, when I was researching the Chester Cemetery, as that is the final resting place of the couple who bought these 40 acres. Back then, I was able to find very little information on them: just the 1880 Census showing Frederick and Fredericke, along with their 27-year-old son, Henry, farming somewhere in Ross Township.

Since 2009, I have discovered findagrave.com, which, through the collective effort of many people, has become a remarkable resource. From information there, I can now fill in some of the missing background, as well as post photos of the Suhrs (above) from the same source.

Frederick and Fredericke (Lichtwarle) Suhr had been married in Germany, their native land, where Frederick worked as a miller. (It was Fredericke's second marriage; her first had produced one son, Charles Schmidt, named for his father.[1]) They came to the U.S. in 1870, evidently just missing the census, and brought with them their three children: Fredrika, Henry, and Emma.[2] They lived in South Chicago at first, but, as we see from our documents above, by 1874 the family moved to Indiana.

Their children all married — most importantly, Emma, in 1887, to Conrad Bender, a man prominent enough in Porter County to rate a biographical sketch in a regional history book, whence I have gleaned some of this information.[3] The other children, Fredrika and Henry, appear to have spent much of their married lives in Illinois.

The Suhrs evidently did well enough on their farm to pay off their mortgage by 1880.

In 1882, at only 65 years of age, Fredericke Suhr died. She was buried in the Chester Cemetery, west of their farm. Frederick then sold the farm and left Indiana to spend the next 15 years in Illinois, probably with one or both of his married children there. He died in 1897, and they brought his body back to Ainsworth, to rest beside Fredericke.

Through their daughter, Emma Bender, their descendants were spread around northwest Indiana. Emma, who died in 1918, was survived by seven children: "Edward F. Bender, of Gary; Mrs. Martha Lute, of Hobart; Mrs. Ida Schenelter of Crown Point; Mrs. Bertha Malone, who lived with her mother in Hobart; Albert C. Bender and Frank J. Bender, who live on and operate the Bender farm in Portage township and Walter F. Bender, of Chesterton."[4]

♦    ♦    ♦
The real estate transaction we're looking at brought up two other names I recognize from past posts. The mortgage of the land in October 1874 was acknowledged before Justice of the Peace Horace Marble, whose 140-acre parcel just south of Ainsworth included the cemetery. (He was listed there, as a farmer, in the 1870 Census, but by 1880 had moved to Hobart and become a "commission merchant.")


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The Horace Marble farm as it appeared on the 1874 Plat Map. Hickory Top had not yet been renamed "Ainsworth."

The assignment of the mortgage, in December 1874, by Mary Chester to her son, Henry, involved J.P. Jesse B. Albee.

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[1] Pictorial and Biographical Record of La Porte, Porter, Lake and Starke Counties, Indiana. Chicago: Goodspeed Brothers, 1894.
[2] "Long Illness Proves Fatal to Mrs. E. Bender," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso), Oct. 20, 1933 (transcribed at findagrave.com).
[3] Goodspeed (1894).
[4] "Long Illness Proves Fatal," 1933.

Climbing False Buckwheat

Lately this vine has been growing so vigorously, not only did it climb up my old apple tree, but great lengths of it are growing over the goldenrod around the tree, weighing it down.


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I found it hard to identify because Newcomb's Wildflower Guide expects you to know how many petals a wildflower's blossoms have. And among all these white appendages, I wasn't sure whether I was looking at fruit or flower.



Eventually I just had to go paging through the "vine" parts of the book, looking for a resemblance … which I found in the drawing of Climbing False Buckwheat. Newcomb says the tiny blossoms have five regular parts. The bigger, frilly, oval or teardrop-shaped things are the fruit.



Perhaps because what's shown in this photo is the farthest growth of the vine, hence the youngest, the stem hasn't turned red yet. Here is an older part, showing the distinctive red stem and heart-shaped leaf.