Unidentified Young Man by Blackhall

A recent acquisition: this photo of a young man.


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The photographer was John Blackhall …



… which means we can date the photo roughly between 1873 and 1893, which is not particularly helpful. Nor can I get any more specific based on what he's wearing.

He is unidentified. I would say that there's something Killigrewish about him — if I hadn't made a New Year's resolution to stop coming up with these theories. It won't last any longer than most New Year's resolutions, I'm sure, but I'd like to keep it through the end of January.

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).


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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.

"Hickory Grove" and Other Mysterious Places

In August of 1874, Hobart's Union Sunday School made plans for its annual picnic. The date was set for Thursday, September 3. The organization's secretary, John Blackhall, wrote to neighboring Sunday schools inviting them to join in the fun. Two of them accepted the invitation: the Underwood school and the Hickory Grove school.


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

I have come across the Underwood name before. There was a one-room schoolhouse by that name in Ross Township, exact location unknown, which may have been associated with a Sunday school as well. But in all my research, I have never come across the name Hickory Grove in this area. Was that a mistake for Hickory Top — the village that eventually became Ainsworth? And then again, was it actually a mistake? Perhaps some people called the village Hickory Grove, while others called it Hickory Top, and somehow the former was overshadowed by the latter in collective memory.

That's just a theory. You know how I love theories.

Anyway, it sounds as if the picnic went off well. The Hobart Cornet Band came along to provide music. The attendees rode in two excursion cars — on the Pennsy Railroad, I'm guessing, since during the planning stages the location was set for Robertsdale, which got its name from George Roberts' giving the Pennsy Railroad right of way through his land.[1] But below the reference to Hickory Grove on the page above, the writer gives "Sheffield" as the location of the picnic. Perhaps those were pretty much the same place. These days you can find Robertsdale on Google maps, but not Sheffield. We do find Sheffield on this section of the 1874 Plat Map showing the west end of North Township:


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Image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

At the eastern border of Sheffield, we find a parcel of land belonging to George Roberts, with the Pennsy Railroad (the southernmost of those three lines) crossing it. Further to the southeast lay another George Roberts, also crossed by the Pennsy Railroad. I don't know which of those gave Robertsdale its name — maybe both?

But all of that area is in Hammond now, and this is as far as I intend to go into Hammond history.

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[1] Gayle Faulkner Kosalko, "Robertsdale has a history all its own," April 3, 2008, NWI Times, https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/robertsdale-has-history-all-its-own/article_df6cf958-2db8-540f-aff0-8f3ea0fe5f81.html

Magnus and the Mysterious Manuscript

I'm glad I corrected my mistake about John Blackhall, since I recently bought a photograph printed by him. Now we can date this photo to within about 20 years, rather than 40 — so, sometime between about 1873 and 1893.


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On that ornately printed back, we find two manuscript lines:

Magnus
fäd 1/2 1825

At first I thought it was a name and a birthdate, but via online translation, we learn that the Swedish word for born is född. Fäd translates to something like fading.

And yet … there is no reason why a Swedish-speaking person could not make a spelling error as easily as an English-speaking person. And what else could the writer possibly have meant?

If we assume that this is a birthdate, then the writer apparently has identified the subject of the photo as a man named Magnus, born on 1 February 1825. Do the census records turn up anyone of that description in the Hobart area?

Why, yes, they do. The 1860 Census shows a 35-year-old blacksmith named Magnus Anderson living in Hobart Township with his wife, Mary, and three children. No one else of that age, with either the first or last name of Magnus, shows up in the area.

I can't find Magnus Anderson in the 1870 Census, but I think I've found him in the 1880 Census — in North Township, age 55, wife named Mary (but her age is off by about three years). While none of the children from 1860 are still in the household, you wouldn't necessarily expect them to be. Magnus is no longer a blacksmith; now he is a "farmer and moss gatherer."

With no 1890 census records available, the next news I have of Magnus is his death, which occurred in Miller. This is what the Hobart Gazette of Dec. 25, 1896, reported:



Slightly more informative is this article from the Chesterton Tribune of Dec. 26, 1896 (downloaded from findagrave.com):



The penultimate sentence gives us a birthdate: January 1, 1825 (if not December 31, 1824). A New Year's Day (or Eve) birthday is certainly memorable … so why didn't the person writing on the back of the photograph get it right?

As much as I'd like to think the photo really is Magnus Anderson, that identification requires two assumptions: (1) that the manuscriptor didn't know how to spell "born"; and that (2) either (a) the manuscriptor couldn't remember that Magnus was born on New Year's Day, for goodness' sake; (b) the Chesterton Tribune got his birthday wrong; or (c) Magnus had gone around telling people he was born on New Year's Day because it was more interesting than being born on February 1, and the manuscriptor alone knew the truth.

Those are pretty big assumptions! I think I still have to classify this photo as unidentified.

Updated Photographer Timeline

I got the beginning date wrong for John Blackhall's Hobart career, so I have posted a corrected photographer timeline over there in Notes on Local Photographers.

The source of my original beginning date (1852) was a article from the Hobart Herald of August 26, 1954. Its author admitted to not knowing when John Blackhall came to Hobart, but made a guess based on dates involved in the transfer of the land where the former Blackhall house sits.

However, I recently got my hands on John Blackhall's 1905 obituary, which describes him arriving in Hobart in 1873. The 1894 obituary of his wife, Agnes (Thompson) Blackhall, agrees ("Entered into Rest," Hobart Gazette 28 Dec. 1894).

Neither of those two sources states when John retired from his photography business. John's obituary says only that "for a number of years [he] was engaged in the photographic business." The 1954 Herald article says he "retired in the early nineties." That is not inconsistent with either of the obituaries, so I am sticking with "circa 1893" as the ending date of John Blackhall's photographic career.