Merry Christmas from the Ainsworth School!

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

There is no date on this program, but one of the participants estimates that it took place in the very late 1930s, or 1940 at the latest. The Ainsworth school had a Christmas program every year (she tells me), as well as a Halloween masquerade party and some sort of program in the spring. And every month during the school year, a "community meeting."

I wish I could index every surname, but Blogger won't let me. So I will just type them out for the search engine: Baldner, Bergman, Blimel, Bodamer, Bowers, Bryant, Buchfuehrer, Bush, Busselburg, Carden, Collins, Dick, Doepping, Dorman, Engstrom, Ford, Gernenz, Harms, Hartin, Homeier, Johnson, Jones, Kissinger, Klemm, Kuntz, Lines, Madura, Maihofer, Mitchell, Moreland, Nelson, O'Brien, Olson, O'Neil, Peterson, Pike, Piske, Ready, Robb, Robinson, Schmidt, Shaw, Sullivan, Tonagel, Watts, Weiler, Wesley, Willy, Wise, Witham, Wojahn, Yager, Ziemanski.

Nellie and the Boys

I thought this was rather touching. Evidently William and Minnie Springman had no biological children, so they made a home for at least four orphans.

The article doesn't name the orphanage, but it was probably Brightside.

There were many Springmans in the area, but this particular Springman family may have been around before Ainsworth was Ainsworth. William Sr. had come here from Homewood, Illinois, "several years" after his marriage in 1862 to his second wife, Charlotte (née Windler), settling on a farm north of what would eventually be called Ainsworth. They had only one child, William Jr. (although William Sr. had a daughter from his first marriage).

In 1892 William Jr. married Minnie Collins. By 1900 the young couple were living on a farm just over the Porter County line, in Union Township. The widowed Charlotte was just then staying with them (William Sr. had died in 1897); she divided her time between her son, her relatives in Homewood, Illinois, and her "little home in Ainsworth." Charlotte died in 1912.

I don't know when William Jr. and Minnie began taking in orphans. The three boys referred to in the article above seem to have fallen between censuses. As for Nellie, she was still with them when the 1920 census came around, and they called her their "daughter" — no "foster" or "adopted" qualification — but concerning her parentage, the census-taker wrote, "Gotten out of orphan asylum" and "Don't know parents."


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ "Death of Old Citizen." Hobart Gazette 19 Apr. 1912.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Obituary." Hobart News 18 Apr. 1912.