Lake Station Schoolchildren, Autumn 1901

From the Elna Hazelgreen collection comes this photograph of Lake Station schoolchildren and staff in the autumn of 1901:


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The good news is that somebody wrote out all the names on the back.



The bad news is that the writer did not explain how the order of names related to the order of children. They seem to match up in terms of gender and apparent age if you start at the left side in the back row, go left-to-right in that row and the middle one, and then go right-to-left in the front row:



That would mean Elna Hazelgreen is at the far left of the front row.

Here's the information I found (if any) from the 1900 Census and 1910 Census about these people:

1901 Lake Station Students by AinsworthIN on Scribd

We've met Olga Foreman before. And Edna Seydel's dad once carried Claus Ziegler around the streets of Lake Station and Hobart in a wheelbarrow.

Blogger won't let me index all these names in one post, so here's something the search engines can read: Conroy, Erlandson, Fabian, Foreman, Fritche, Hazelgreen, Horn, Johnson, Killian, Lenburg, Marquardt, Matson, Miller, Nelson, Papka, Reich, Roper, Seydel, Thorne, Whent.

She Was a V, A, M, P …

My only memory of the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour is Cher's recurring vamp song, which comes to mind now that I'm delivering on my promise to dish the dirt about Emma Shearer.

I will let this newspaper article from October 2, 1908, tell the story:



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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.) 2 Oct. 1908.

Although the article gives her earlier husband's name as James Adams, per the county records it was Anthony S. Adams, and the date of their marriage February 28, 1901. She was then about 34 years old, he about 28 — old enough to know what he was doing, you'd think. But what "disclosures" could he have made to provoke her to kick him out of the buggy? My guess is that he hadn't gotten around to divorcing a previous wife … or perhaps had a lot of debt.

After divorcing Mr. Adams, Emma appears not to have married anyone else until November 17, 1906, when she and John Kroledge joined their hearts together. He was ten years her junior. Their marital bliss lasted almost two years, it seems.

Several weeks after the above publicity about their impending divorce, another disgruntled hired man came forward:


Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.) 20 Nov. 1908.

I have not been able to learn the outcome of any of these cases. I assume the divorce came through, since John Kroledge married again during Emma's lifetime.

But I did come across this tantalizing tidbit from the spring of 1909 …


Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.) 13 Apr. 1909.

… which stirred up in my mind a vague memory of Emma and Michael O'Hearn being connected somehow, long ago; so I went searching among my notes and found that yes, indeed, they had been closely connected. I don't know exactly when it started, but by the spring of 1895 they were secret lovers. She was about 29, he about 33. In the spring of 1896 their quiet romance ended — loudly.


Hobart Gazette 17 Apr. 1896.


Hobart Gazette 8 May 1896.

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I have yet to learn much about the rest of Emma's life, but at the moment it appears there were no more marriages. In 1910, Emma — living alone, apparently, on her farm on Tenth Street — gave her surname as Kroledge and her status as widowed (the enumerator was Charles A. Blank, who, as a resident of Miller, might not have heard the real story). In 1920, she was still Emma Kroledge, but now "divorced." In her household was a 51-year-old hired man; let us hope he was satisfied with his wages. I cannot find Emma in the 1930 Census.

Emma Kroledge, "widow," died in the Lake County Poor Asylum on May 7, 1932.


Hobart Gazette 12 May 1932.

What little I know of Emma's siblings suggests that all of them were, shall we say, unsettled. I believe brother Charles served a short time in prison in the 1890s; someday I will discuss him in more detail.

Her sister, Mary Ellen, had married John Mander in 1873, and, as we've learned, the marriage was not happy.

"Mrs. Nora Ensign" is somewhat mysterious, because I can't find that Emma ever had a sister named Nora; she did, however, have a sister named Elizabeth E., born in 1857, whose death certificate (1934) described her as the widow of William Ensign … who, according to the marriage records as transcribed on Ancestry.com, married "F. Ellen Shearer" in 1881. We've met Elizabeth Ensign before and learned that she described herself as widowed in 1910 and divorced in 1920. She had two sons, John and Walter (and through John she was the grandmother of Richard Ensign). I can't find Elizabeth in 1930, but I do find a Nora Ensign living in Hobart — about three years older than you would expect Elizabeth to be. Which leads to something else interesting: the marriage records show a Nora Ensign marrying a Fred Kappelman in 1899; and the 1900 census shows John and Walter Ensign living with their mother, whose name is nearly illegible but looks as if it could be "Kappelman, Norra" (you can see for yourself here), and who told the enumerator she had been married for one year. The question is: where was Fred Kappelman in 1900? I have no idea. I have reason to think he was still alive, though I can't find him outside of the local newspapers.

As for William Ensign, I don't know what became of him. I can't find any record of his death.

And as for the "family lot in the Hobart cemetery" mentioned in Emma Kroledge's obituary: I cannot find Emma, nor her parents, nor her sisters in Hobart Cemetery — or anywhere else, for that matter.


Additional Sources:
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ Indiana Death Certificates.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.

The Bijou

I wonder why I bought this postcard.


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As the legend tells us, this is "The Bijou" in East Gary, aka Lake Station, photographed in 1909 by A. Haase. Where exactly in East Gary it was, I do not know.

Nor do I know exactly what the Bijou was. A restaurant? — you can see some tables out in the yard there, which would make a nice place to eat in the summer.

The baseball game of June 9, 1918, mentioned in this post, took place "at the Bijou grounds." I made a note of that because it concerned Company K, not because it concerned the Bijou. Now I wish I had paid more attention to the newspapers for any other information about the Bijou.


On the back of the postcard, one person I never heard of writing to another:



I actually looked these people up in the 1910 Census. They were sisters, Ellen being 26 and Anna 23 in 1910.


So … that's the Bijou.

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[8/10/2015 update] In the "Local Drifts" column of the Hobart Gazette of March 31, 1905, I came across this item:

On Tuesday [March 27], Hugo Zobjeck, administrator of the Kucaba estate, through his attorney, Asa Bullock, entered in a contract with Frank Florian for the purchase of the Bijou resort at Lake Station, the price being $5,300. The resort embraces forty acres. Mr. Florian is a wealthy hay and grain dealer in Chicago and he expects to vastly improve the property the coming season.

So I go to the next available plat map, the 1908 Plat Map, and find F. Florian owning — not forty acres, but a nice little bit of land:


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Most of this land would be in the southern part of what's now Riverview Park — yes? I can't tell exactly. Maybe just south of the park. Of course the difference between 1905 and 1908, and between forty acres and the smaller parcel shown on the plat map, means we can't be sure this is where the Bijou was. But at least now we know the Bijou was a "resort."

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[9/22/2015 update] I have come across a couple of newspaper tidbits relevant to the Bijou. First, from the "General News Items" of the Hobart Gazette of August 19, 1904: "Hans Thune conducted a dance last evening in the Bijou hall south of Lake Station. The Spencer orchestra furnished the music." A location "south of Lake Station" is not inconsistent with the Riverview Park area.

Secondly, this item in the "Local Drifts" of the Hobart Gazette of October 28, 1904, describes the father of Mary Kucaba Zobjeck as residing at the Bijou:

Frank A. Kucaba who lived at the Bijou near Lake died in a hospital in Chicago, where he had been for treatment, on Saturday, Oct. 22, it being his 54th birthday. Funeral services were held last Tuesday in Chicago, his former home. The deceased leaves a wife, one son and six daughters.

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[12/6/2015 update] This "Notice" placed in the Hobart Gazette of June 6, 1902, is mostly Greek to me, but it does seem to show Frank Kucaba owning land bordering on the land shown in the 1908 map above as belonging to F. Florian, in the southwest quarter of Section 16 … roughly in the area of present-day Riverview Park.


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I do not know anything about Andrew Peter Larson.