Bale's Island

At the Hobart Historical Society museum, I asked to be shown, on the Google satellite view of Hobart, where Bale's Island was. Here is my attempt to reproduce what I was shown:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from Google Maps.

We're looking at an area south of Sixth Street, just east of Gilbert Court.

It wasn't an island, but a swimming hole used by kids such as Elinor Ferren, born in 1911, who grew up in Hobart and told stories to her daughter about swimming there on the girls' days (as opposed to the boys' days).

According to a 1970 Gazette article, Bale's Island was "completely surrounded by water" when B.B. and Emily Bale settled in that area and built their first home, a log cabin, circa 1866.[1] I seem to recall reading elsewhere (if I could only remember where!) that the "island" became an island only on occasions when Duck Creek was running high.

The 1970 article was accompanied by this letter of reminiscences, written by Dorothy Mellon Gant, born in 1912.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The Mellon family lived at 1001 Georgianna Street (1930 and 1940 censuses). Here is Dorothy Mellon as a senior in high school, from the 1930 Aurora.


Image from Ancestry.com.


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[1] "Here's Bale's Island," Hobart Gazette, 21 May 1970.

"Where Is the Christmas Spirit in Hobart?"

From 77 years ago today, some Christmas unhappiness:


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All images from the Hobart Gazette, 20 Dec. 1945.



OK, back to the usual good cheer.

A Stealth Dentist

I bought this postcard because I didn't have this exact view of the 300 block of Main Street.


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It is the east side of Main Street, looking south from Third Street. The postcard is postmarked February 1, 1911.

We've seen all of these things before. What interests me in particular is the second story of 301-305 Main, where we see several awnings and a sign jutting out, all with the word "Dentist." At street level, under the big sign for the law partnership of Bozarth & Bozarth,[1] there is a small plaque with the nearly illegible name of a dentist.

The 1910 Census shows two dentists in town — Fred Werner and Charles Kenward — and of those two names, I think Kenward looks more likely.

But I never heard of Charles Kenward before. How is it possible that I've read so many issues of Hobart newspapers from this era and never heard of one of the two town dentists?

His obituary, from the Hobart Gazette of June 10, 1943, says that he moved to Hobart in 1905 and practiced his profession here until 1918.


(Click on image to enlarge)


Image from findagrave.com

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I already covered most of the other businesses in this photo in another post about a similar postcard, dated the same year, but looking at this side of the 300 block from the other direction.

Notice that the awning of Scheddell's Drug Store reads "The Mackey Drug Store."

Turning the postcard over, we find it signed "Evea" — I think that's Evea Miller, whom we've met before.



The Floyd with a cold was her toddler-age son. I wonder whom she was planning on leaving him at home with? As for poor Nora, she is a mystery to me.

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[1] I'm not sure who the lawyers were; possibly Nelson and William Bozarth, father and son, who were Valparaiso residents in 1910 but might have had an office in Hobart.

Drug Money in Ainsworth

Today I want to look at the northeastern part of Ross Township as shown on the 1939 Plat Map.


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Sometime during the 1930s, Roland G. and Gladys B. Schmitt quietly bought up farmland that had belonged to two of Ainsworth's long-time residents, Charles Chester and Henry Nolte.[1] If I'm reading the plat map correctly, by 1939 the Schmitts owned some 400 acres. Where, during the Great Depression, would the money for that kind of purchase come from? The answer is: drugs. Roland Godfrey Schmitt was an executive with the expanding drugstore chain, Walgreens.

Born in Warsaw, Illinois, in 1890, he had started with Walgreens when he was just 20 years old and the chain itself not quite 10.

Roland G. Schmitt’s path to and through Walgreens would become a well-worn one, and it is still traveled today. The very day he enrolled in the Illinois School of Pharmacy in 1910, he noticed a “help wanted” announcement on a bulletin board at the school for a part-time apprentice at Walgreen’s first store at the corner of Cottage Grove and Bowen avenues. In the same youthful spirit that Walgreen demonstrated when he hopped on a train from Dixon to Chicago 17 years earlier, Schmitt stepped on a streetcar that afternoon, introduced himself to Arthur Thorsen — who was impressed by the young man’s wit and warmth — and accepted Thorsen’s offer of $8 a week (just $3 more than Walgreen earned after he got off the train almost two decades before).

Schmitt worked at the store every morning for an hour and a half, took the same streetcar back to school for a day of classes, then returned to the store to work from 6 P.M. to midnight — then got up and did it again after a few hours of sleep. After graduation, Schmitt became a full-time employee, a store manager, and finally the vice president of store operations — an unusually well-liked man with an easy smile. He retired in 1960, after putting in a very productive half century with Walgreens.[2]

In 1912, Roland married Amanda Schilling. By the 1920 Census — at which time there were 23 stores in the Walgreens Chain[3] — Roland and Amanda were living on Chicago's south side with their one-year-old son, Roland Jr. In September of 1922, Amanda died. Five months later, Roland Sr. married Gladys Forsaith. Together they would have two more children, Robert and Gloria.

The Schmitt family remained Chicago residents, per the 1930 and 1940 censuses. For them and their relatives and friends, I expect the farm was something of a vacation home. It was still a working farm, though. Roland Schmitt turned it into a big chicken-raising operation, producing eggs to sell in Walgreens stored. He hired local people to operate it. Among them, for a few years, was my late friend Eldon Harms. These are my notes from a conversation with Eldon in 2010:

The chicken houses were near the main house,[4] north and west of it on the same side of Ainsworth Road. They had some 2,000 chickens. Eldon worked on weekends, earning enough money to pay for his own textbooks (he was in high school at the time) and one suit of school clothes, and then his parents bought him another so he had a change.

The hens were all in nests along the walls. You had to go collect the eggs a couple times a day; if you left them there they'd be broken when the hens got to fighting over the nests. Eldon also had to clear out the old straw and lay down fresh, and if you want to hear some singing, you should have been there when the hens got the fresh straw. They just loved it.

The eggs had to be carried down into the storeroom in the basement of the house. They had one of those outside entrances, too. Twice a month a big green semi-trailer would come out from Chicago to collect the eggs.

He didn't earn a lot of money, but it was better than nothing.

I'm guessing the Schmitts built the guest house of which the chimney still stands in the woods north of Big Maple Lake. The main house was certainly large enough to accommodate guests, but a rustic cabin out in the forest (with indoor plumbing and gas piped in) would have been a more vacation-like getaway.

In December 1943 the Schmitts sold off their Ainsworth farm. I will get to that episode soon.

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Here is Roland's obituary from the Dixon Evening Telegraph of December 29, 1964.


(Click on images to enlarge)

And Gladys', from the Chicago Tribune of August 13, 1987.




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[1] As we know, Henry Nolte had been murdered in 1934, leaving no immediate family. Charles Chester was still living, but I am told by descendants of his that financial problems compelled him to sell, sometime in the 1930s, the farm that had been in his family for nearly a century.
[2] John U. Bacon. America's Corner Store: Walgreens' Prescription for Success. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.
[3] "Walgreen Drug Stores," Chicagology (https://chicagology.com/walgreens/).
[4] The former Chester house, which stood on the west side of Big Maple Lake and was demolished in 2021.

Alphonso Smith by Any Other Name

Let's take another look at those statements of account from my last post.



(Reverse of the above:)





Who (you might ask) was that Alphonso Smith guy who bought all that coal from B.B. Bale?

Searching on that name in that place on Ancestry.com brings up only one record: the 1870 Census, where he's a boy of 14 living in the household of Fanny Smith, in Hobart.


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Image from Ancestry.com.

This census did not record how household members were related to each other. It didn't take me long to find out that Mariam Brock was Fannie's daughter, and Carrie Brock her granddaughter. But no other records places Alphonso and Fannie together in one household.

However, in the 1860 Census, Fannie's household includes a boy named Bernett who was then four years old — born the same year as the 1870 Alphonso. Once we assume they are the one and the same, it becomes easier to find this coal-purchasing guy. He was Bernett Elfonso Smith — and yes, it seems he spelled his middle name with an E; only when other people are writing it does the A appear.[1]

I think it was he who signed that promissory note to B.B. Bale:



Part of the signature was lost, but you can see the E plainly enough.

Bernett Elfonso was born to Henry and Fanny (Wheeler) Smith circa 1856. That was probably the same year his father died. His parents were in Porter County for the 1850 Census, but by 1860, as we've seen, the family moved to Hobart. There the widowed Fanny raised her children and spent the rest of her life. Although I can't find the family in the 1880 Census,[2] the Bale coal accounts place him there in the late 1880s, and the promissory note in 1892. And here we have another receipt placing him in Hobart in 1893 — buying some groceries and household goods from John Wood.


(Click on image to enlarge)

Notwithstanding these appearances in Hobart, it seems that Bernett Elfonso also spent time in Illinois, probably Chicago: in 1888 he married Helen Brown in Cook County, and by 1900 they were living in Chicago with their young daughter, Sarah. At that time B.E. worked as a teamster.

But sometime after 1900 the family moved to California. The 1910 Census shows them in Pasadena (B.E. working as an "investigator" for a gas and electric company), and the 1920 Census shows B.E. and his wife farming in Fresno County (their daughter having moved out of the house and married). On May 30, 1929, B.E. Smith died in Fresno.[3]


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Fresno Morning Republican, 3 June 1929.

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Having found that last death notice, I thought I had settled the whole life of Bernett Elfonso Smith, so you can imagine my confusion when I came across this obituary in the Hobart Gazette of October 29, 1942:


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Could there possibly be two Bernett Elfonso Smiths in Hobart's history? Unlikely as it seems, the answer is yes. The one who died in 1942 was the nephew of the one who died in 1929: the son of his elder brother, George.


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[1] In the Union Sunday School record book that begins in 1868, a scholar named "Burnett" and one named "Alphonso" are (or is) recorded, although the actual dates of attendance are unclear.
[2] The 1880 census of Hobart is very hard to read, so the name could easily be mistranscribed; but I have looked through all 30 pages of it on Ancestry.com without being able to find Fannie or Bernett Elfonso — only her son/his brother, Frank Smith.
[3] The commercial papers in this post and my previous post about B.B. Bale (as well as another post to come) all came from a seller in Fresno.

"No Athletes, No Musicians!"

This Help Wanted ad appeared in the Hobart Gazette of November 11, 1942.


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Is that the voice of Carl Krausse I hear, echoing down the years?


Further down the same column, we find an ad placed by Claude Groom of Ainsworth (or thereabouts). A few years ago someone mentioned him to me and I had to admit I did not know the first thing about him. Well, now I know the first thing about him: he sold milk-fed turkeys.

At the top of the middle column, we learn that in Hobart in 1942 you could still rent a house with an outdoor toilet, if you wanted to. On that note, do historians of Hobart (like historians of Munster, where I grew up) know the location of the last outdoor toilet in town?

Hobart's First Coal Merchant, and the Last of His Name

I recently bought a little packet of commercial papers, held together with a straight pin (because what else do you use when paper clips and staplers haven't been invented yet?).


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Upon taking out the rusty straight pin and getting a good look at the individual papers, we find that they concern sales of coal in 1887 and 1888 by Hobart's own Bell Benjamin Bale.



This is on the reverse of the above:







From the obituaries written up in the local papers following his death on March 25, 1927, we learn that he was Hobart's first coal merchant and established the first coal yard in town. We learn a good deal more, too, for B.B. Bale had been a Hobart resident for some 60 years, known to all, and so his death, and his life, received much attention.


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Hobart Gazette, 1 Apr. 1927.


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Hobart News, 31 Mar. 1927

More details come from this write-up of his sixtieth wedding anniversary, which fell on December 1, 1922. (The text of the article comes from a photocopy of a typewritten manuscript in the Bale file at the Hobart Historical Society Museum, which has no date or source; while it reads like a newspaper article, it's not from the Gazette, and the issues of the News where it might have appeared are missing from the microfilm.)

Mr. and Mrs. Bale Observe 60th Wedding Anniversary
Mr. and Mrs. B.B. Bale, among Hobart's oldest and highly esteemed citizens, on Friday last passed the sixtieth anniversary of their wedded lives, the day being observed by no outward celebration but rather remembered quietly in their home together in keeping with their unostentatious lives.

Mrs. Bale, whose maiden name was Emily Turner Belding, was the daughter of George and Emily Belding and was born December 8, 1837, in the County of Norfolk, England, where her parents owned a large estate.

Mr. Bale, son of John and Mary Bale, also residents of Norfolk County, was born December 25, 1835. At the time of his marriage, December 1, 1862, which was celebrated in the Episcopal church of which both Mr. and Mrs. Bale have been life-long members, he operated one of the large farms of Mr. Belding's estate. Four years after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Bale decided they would come to America, arriving in this country June 14, 1866. They came through to New York and soon thereafter to Hobart, then scarcely more than a wilderness with perhaps about a dozen and a half scattered homes.

They stayed at a little boarding house, located where the Kramer block now stands, for a few weeks after their arrival, while their own log cabin was being constructed on the beautiful little isle long since known as "Bale's Island." Traces yet remain there of what was once their home and its pleasant surroundings.

During the first year or two of their residence on the island they had no near neighbors, but later the Parks family located on the farm across the creek, [1] then quite a stream, and still later the Daniel Lightner family moved near on the place now owned by his grandson, Dick Johnston, and family. Four years, Mr. and Mrs. Bale lived on the island, then built their present home where they have resided for the past 52 years. At the time of their moving there, their own home and that of the Wettengel family and a little house occupied by the Decourcy family, located near where the Swedish Lutheran church now stands, were all the houses then built on the east side of the bridge over Duck creek.

"In town," Black's store was the center of business and the post-office. Andrew Wall, Sr., and family lived in a little house near Black's. Ernest Passow, a brother of the late Christian Passow, Sr., conducted a grocery and shoe shop in a little building located on the corner of Third and Main streets in the space now occupied by the Central Drug Store. Mr. and Mrs. John Mathews, both now passed away, had a home near what is now the Community building. The brick building on School Street at the rear of the M.E. Church, now remodeled and occupied as a dwelling by Mrs. Margaret Rohwedder, was once the public school building where also were conducted Sunday School and church services, a traveling preacher occasionally coming to officiate. Here Mrs. Bale, assisted by Mrs. Wedge, Mrs. DeCourcy, Mrs. Nixon and Alfred French as its superintendent, established the first Sunday school in Hobart, known as the "Union Sunday School." Their music was assisted by a little melodion which Mr. French carried to and from the building each Sunday.

Mr. Bale operated the first coal yard in Hobart. Some thirty years ago he was attacked with grip which settled in his hips leaving him a sufferer and partial invalid for life which caused him to retire from active business.

Mr. and Mrs. Bale have known Hobart through all its years of changes and development and, through their association with its interests, have contributed much to the upbuilding of the town.

May coming years be measured full of life's choice blessings is the wish prompted by the steadfast friendships they have won.

Emily Bale was interviewed in 1937 on the occasion of her 100th birthday.



While the handwritten notes on this photocopy give the source as the Chicago Tribune of December 12, 1937, I have not been able to find this article in that issue online, or any other online paper.


I haven't finished with the Bales, or with this little collection of papers regarding coal sales, either, but this is all I have time for today.

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[1] I believe the reference is to Duck Creek.

Smooth Aster?

It's a bit late in the season to start trying to repair my lack of knowledge about the various types of asters, but I came across this poor little thing still blooming out in my field, and just had to try to identify it.

The blossom is pale lilac, with a yellow central disk.



The leaves clasp the stem, and their edges are smooth or almost imperceptibly toothed.



I think it's a Smooth Aster. They normally grow as high as four feet, but this particularly one has been run over by a brush mower a couple of times during the summer.

I've previously identified two other varieties of lilac-colored asters. Not sure if I'm right about any of these.

Holy Nosegay!

In the Sievert-Thompson collection at the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society Museum are several personalized bibles, with their covers bearing the name of a Sievert family member and a year — the year, I suppose, when the bible was presented as a gift to the family member, at Christmas or on a birthday or some special occasion.

Here we have one given to Ida Lewin Sievert in 1903. Ida was then about 28 years old. She and her husband, Henry, farmed just west of Ainsworth, and had a little daughter (a son was yet to come). It is a German-language bible, die Heilige Schrift.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Ida, like nearly every other owner of a bible or prayer book, slipped things between the leaves — for example, the little card above from her neighbor, Pearl Ols.

She also pressed flowers in it, like this little nosegay with its stems still bound by a thread.



I think there are two roses in there, along with some clover blossoms and a couple of many-petaled blooms like chrysanthemums or zinnias. (By the way, 4 Mose = Numbers, for us English-speakers.)


The card from Pearl Ols mentions a 25th wedding anniversary, which was probably Ida's and Henry's. That fell on March 17, 1921, just about four months before Ida's death.

Edward Clifford Stolp: A Mystery Solved

Among the many images in Minnie Rossow Harms' steamer trunk was this photo of a young violinist, taken probably circa 1912.


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

Handwritten notes on the back identify him as Clifford Stolp.



I've mentioned before that Clifford and his ultimate fate were a mystery to me. But recently I came across a short article in the Hobart Gazette of January 21, 1943, announcing, without much explanation, his death on January 9. However, that gave me a time frame, which made further research practical.
I found this article from the Nashville Banner of January 13:


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It helpfully explains who his wife and daughter were, as otherwise I would not have known. The only marriage record I had previously found for him was of his 1922 marriage to Dorothy Featherston (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index) and that one, it appears from the 1930 Census, ended in divorce. Clifford and Estelle married sometime around April 1941.[1] I do not know what brought Clifford to Tennessee in the first place, but now he rests there forever.

Here is another article from the January 21 Oak Leaves (Oak Park, Ill.).


((Click on image to enlarge)

Both articles, you will notice, give January 10 as the date of his death.

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The Gazette mentioned that Clifford Stolp "was an uncle to Billy and Carol Ann Stolp" of Hobart. Those were the children of his brother, Willard, who married Clara Shearer in 1929 (Indiana Marriage Collection). The Gazette added that Clifford had "numerous other relatives and friends in Hobart, having resided here at one time" — which we know, from the 1920 Census. He was, of course, related to the Rossows, and hence to the Harmses.

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[1] "Marriage Licenses," Nashville Banner, 14 Apr. 1941.

Ainsworth Then and Now: the Sievert Farmhouse

Circa 1942, and 2022:



(Click on images to enlarge)
Top image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Thank goodness for Google street view, which saves me from having to go park my car on the shoulder-less 69th Ave. or DeKalb Street to get a photo of the old Sievert farmhouse.

Which, it turns out, is probably the old Brown farmhouse, since the county records show 1850 as the year it was built, and that was before the Sieverts came to Ross Township. The earliest record I can find of ownership of that land, from Early Land Sales, Lake County, is its purchase in May of 1844 by Severn Brown, who bought 80 acres constituting the west half of Section 7.

Severn Brown rests in the Chester Cemetery, along with his wife, Elizabeth.

I shall certainly have to write more about the Brown family, as well as the Sievert family, but at present my brain is very, very tired and has taken a leave of absence to rest and recuperate, and I don't know when it will return.

Unidentified Young Man, But I Have a Theory

The seller on Ebay described this item as "Carte de Visite Gentleman Crazy Eyes." The subject of the photo was not identified, but the photographer was — Blackhall of Hobart — and that got my attention. As we know, John Blackhall was one of Hobart's earliest professional photographers. A photo by him would date prior to the mid-1890s, and perhaps as early as 1873.


(Click on image to enlarge)

The young man does have a piercing gaze, doesn't he? — although I wouldn't go so far as to call it "crazy." I can't even guess as to the year of the photo — men's fashions are so much harder to date than women's. This photo could have been taken anytime during Blackhall's career.



Once I received the original photo and started studying it, I began to feel that there was something familiar about this man. And then I began thinking about Fred Rose, Sr.

Fred Sr.'s presence in Hobart coincided with the later years of Blackhall's photography business. According to the earliest census records we have of Fred, he came to this country from Germany in 1882,[1] and his 1942 obituary states that he arrived in Hobart that same year,[2] at which time he was about 16 years of age.

Here is our unidentified young man side-by-side with a circa-1921 portrait of Fred Rose, Sr. (which I'm using because both photos were taken from nearly the same angle).


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image on the right courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Here I've taken a colorized copy of the young man and superimposed it on the Chief of Police:



There are remarkable similarities about the nose and mouth. There are also remarkable dissimilarities about the crown of the head, the eyes and the ears. I am aware that different cameras can produce surprising differences in a subject's face, but could that, or a 30-year time lapse, explain the differences we see here?

In an earlier photo of Fred, taken circa 1891, his eyes look more like the unidentified subject's.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The crown of the head is hidden in this one. But the ears! How can I explain away those ears?

So, as fond as I am of my theory that the unidentified subject could be a young Fred Rose, Sr., I have to admit that there's good evidence that it's wrong. Perhaps what we're seeing here is a general family resemblance, in some relative of Fred's who came to visit him in Hobart and sat for a photograph by John Blackhall.

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[9/17/2022 update] Hobart historian Suzi sends me this photo of Fred Rose, Sr. to show me that my theory is totally off the rails.


(Sorry, it doesn't get any bigger than this)

Since the photo was taken at Showman's Gallery, it would date between 1893 and 1899. (The descendants' faces were a later addition to the image, I'm sure.)

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[1] The 1900 Census and the 1910 Census record 1882 as his year of immigration; the 1920 Census says 1885, the 1930 Census 1883; and the 1940 Census does not include that information.
[2] "Last Rites Held for Hobart's Fire Chief, F. Rose Sr.," Gazette, 26 Mar. 1942.

Yet Another View of the Hobart Township School

I don't think I've posted this exact image before.


(Click on images to enlarge)

The verso doesn't help us date the photo.



No postmark, message or addressee, and the stamp box doesn't tell us anything except that the postcard is probably pre-1920. From the style of the postcard, we know was manufactured after March 1907. I have another digital copy of this image that I got in 2007, which is sitting on my computer and identified as being from 1914, although I did not note down my basis for assigning it that date. However, 1914 sounds reasonable.

I like this image because it captures a couple of the homes on New Street, which used to run along the east side of the old high school, southward almost to Duck Creek. This detail from a 1922 Sanborn map shows the two houses in the photo — the first two south of Fourth Street — as well as five other houses to the south.



I don't know when the last of those houses were demolished. I have previously posted this 1954 aerial view showing some kind of structures on the sites, but it's not clear enough to be sure those are the same houses:


(Click on image to enlarge)