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.