Swamp Rose

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These pretty wild roses are growing in a low area off just off the side of Ainsworth Road that tends to be wet (when we're not having a drought).

Fannie Wheeler Smith

I have been meaning to post this ever since I wrote about Frank and B.E. Smith.

This is the obituary of their mother, Fannie Wheeler Smith.


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Hobart Gazette, 22 Sept. 1899.

I never cease to marvel at how much people traveled in the days when traveling was hard, slow, and miserable.

Fannie's husband, Henry, may have been fairly comfortable financially, if he handled his mill earnings and his Gold Rush money wisely, so perhaps when he died in 1856, he did not leave her in dire financial straits with four young children (or three children and a pregnancy). Nonetheless, the 1860 Census shows her working as a seamstress. By the summer of 1866, as we learn from B.B. Bale's obituary, she and her eldest surviving son, Frank, were operating a hotel together (although the article about the Bales' 60th wedding anniversary describes it as a "small boarding house").

The 1870 Census lists Fannie's occupation as "keeping house." She had only one minor child still at home, but also her 23-year-old daughter, Mariam Brock — who may have been widowed by then — and a little granddaughter. Still, it seems she no longer felt the need to earn money.

As I've mentioned before, I can't find her in the 1880 Census.

I do not know Fannie's middle name. If it began with E., her grave in Hobart Cemetery is marked. If not, then, apparently, it isn't.

Incidentally, Fannie's surviving sister, Mrs. M.H. Earle of Pasadena, was the divorced first wife of John Earle (George's son). They had been married in Lake County on April 12, 1854. I do not know when they were divorced.

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While I'm at it, here is the obituary of Mariam Smith Brock from the Hobart Gazette of November 6, 1909.


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Subtract 37 from 1909 and you get 1872 as the year her husband died; however, the writer did say "about thirty-seven years," so it's possible she was widowed when the 1870 Census recorded her living with her mother. I haven't been able to locate any record of John Brock's death.

Mariam was laid to rest beside her mother, says the article, and the NWIGS' book of Hobart Township cemetery listings records M.N. Brock next to F.E. Smith in row W4 of Hobart Cemetery. Neither stone has any information about birth or death or anything else.

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7/5/2023 update — Thanks to Suzi at the Hobart Historical Society for finding Fannie and Mariam in the 1880 census:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Fannie kept house, while Mariam worked as a dressmaker. Mariam now has a seven-year-old son as well as a daughter, so perhaps I was wrong in guessing that she had been widowed by 1870.

Pale Dogwood

I finally got around to trying to identify the shrub that's been taking over my field these last few years. Due to various unfortunate circumstances I wasn't able to mow properly this year, or last, and now about half my property has become an impenetrable thicket of this stuff.

I think it's pale dogwood, also known as swamp dogwood, or blue-fruited dogwood. Cornus obliqua.


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The undersides of the leaves are pale, compared to the upper sides.



The blossoms are tiny, with multiple blooms in heads. They smell sweet, and the flying things like them.





I will have to wait until late summer to see if the blossoms turn into blue berries, the way pale dogwood blossoms are supposed to.


Pale dogwood is a native wildflower, and according to this website, its status in Indiana is "secure." I'll say it's secure! It's more than secure.

And now there's a pair of red-winged blackbirds nesting somewhere among all the pale dogwood in my field. I know because they get upset whenever I walk out there. So I can't mow it down, even though my broken brush mower finally got repaired. But just wait until next March.

My Barn's Centennial

One of my earliest posts on this blog concerned the graffiti on my barn that made me believe it was built in June of 1923. Which would mean that it is 100 years old this month.

It's not looking very good, but it's still standing.


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Here's a detail from a photo of the back yard I took not long after I bought this place in 1990 …



… and here it is circa 1998:



Yes, I let it go to pieces. It's returning to the earth whence it came.

The barn was probably built by George Bodamer — or perhaps I should say, by people hired by George Bodamer, who in 1923 was 70 years old.

Golden-Backed Snipe Flies of Ainsworth

I am not going to start a Flies of Ainsworth series, not for lack of flies, but because usually those jerks won't hold still long enough to be photographed … only, this little cutie did.


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My phone may take lousy pictures, but at least it can tell me (or try to tell me) what I just photographed. I don't know how else I would have ever identified this Golden-Backed Snipe Fly.

Bad Times at the Black Cat: Crime Report

Thanks to an outbreak of crime in 1953, we learn that in addition to the restaurant/motel, there was a Black Cat Garage.

This first is from the Hobart Gazette of January 8, 1953.


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Betty Reed was working at midnight — when did she get to sleep? And then this jerk hits her! His fine was about $177 in today's money.


I didn't keep track of the exact dates for these next two Gazette articles, but they were from the spring or summer of 1953.