Gay-Mill Gardens

Miller is outside my bailiwick, but having previously encountered a 1922 ad in the Hobart newspaper for the Gay-Mill Gardens, I couldn't help but be thrilled to receive a photo of the place.


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Image courtesy of R.F.

The 1922 ad described the location as Lake and Forrest Avenues, so I suppose the photographer was standing on Forest Avenue and looking west toward Lake Street.

This photo was among a group relating to the Buchfuehrer family. William Buchfuehrer may have been driving the Henderson Ice Cream truck out front of the Gay-Mill Gardens. He was employed by the Henderson factory in Hobart off and on during the 1920s and '30s. In fact, in 1937 he (in partnership with William Ittel) purchased the factory, and went on to operate it for some 20 years. But this photo predates that purchase — by 1937 the Gay-Mill was abandoned. The cars in the photo are from the early 1920s (as the Ainsworth vintage-car expert tells me), so the photo probably was taken not long after the Gay-Mill first opened.

Maypoles and Gay-Mill Gardens

Tidbits from south of Deep River, late in May 1922:


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Hobart News 25 May 1922.

The list of Ainsworth graduates confirms my earlier guess (which wasn't exactly genius-level in the first place), and gives a few details about the graduation ceremonies — drills and Maypole dances in an open field that may have been a bit muddy.

So Howard H. Smith, who has been living in an undisclosed location at least since January 1922, when Melvin and Verna Guernsey moved onto his farm, is now building a house on his Porter County land? — and where might that be, I wonder?

Excuse me while I look at Union Township maps on a hunch …

… what do you know, it's right across the county line from his Lake County land.


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Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/UnionTownshipMaps.html, courtesy of Steven R. Shook.

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This advertisement for the Gay-Mill Gardens sounds as if May 27, 1922 might be its grand opening …


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Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

… but if that's the case, then why is the "mirror floor" already famous?

In Dreams of Duneland, Kenneth J. Schoon describes the Gay Mill as "a vibrant dance and social hall with an adjacent hotel and even lakefront houses for rent." It must have seemed quite glamorous to people accustomed to dancing above a blacksmith's shop or in an old schoolhouse, if they ever ventured through the Gay-Mill doors.