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Hobart News 25 Aug. 1921.
The first accident occurred at the intersection of present-day E. 73rd Ave. and Grand Blvd./S.R. 51. That spot may have been particularly dangerous, with Lincoln Highway tourists adding to the traffic, and heaven knows if there was even a stop sign at the intersection.
William Fisher (husband of
Jennie Hurlburt) was innocently getting the honey from
Joe's bees when an anonymous driver struck his car on Old Ridge Road.
The column to the left of the "Week-End Accidents" relates the adventures of the local young men in the
National Guard. I believe the John Fisher mentioned in that story was William's nephew.
♦ ♦ ♦
In other auto-related news, I now learn of yet another named highway that (like the
Yellowstone Trail) I'd never heard of before; but the "Liberty Highway" is so obscure that I have not been able yet to determine whether it, too, was a cross-country route, or ran only between Kokomo and Chicago.
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Hobart Gazette 26 Aug. 1921.
In addition to a reminder of the hard times the nation was experiencing, the "Local Drifts" column notes the purchase by Joseph Wegesin of the Thomas Roper farm "south of Deepriver." The only farm I can find matching that description shows up in the
1891 Plat Book in the northeast corner of Winfield Township:
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Image from the 1939 Plat Book.
Blog-wise, I've ignored the Wegesin family up until now. In my newspaper notes, I've recorded only two mentions.* One was in 1911, when Mrs. Conrad Wegesin (Joseph's mother) came down from Chicago to the home of
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fasel, Sr. for Mrs. Fasel's 54th birthday party. The second was in May 1920, when Joseph's oldest daughter, Gladys, attended a birthday party for Lillie Fasel, who was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fasel, Sr. (I wonder if the Wegesins had a family connection to the Fasels?)
From a brief look at the official records, I gather that sometime after Joseph's birth in Ohio in 1881, his parents, Conrad and Mary, moved the family to Chicago, where 1900 census found them. About a year later, Joseph married Martha Semmer, who also went by the name Magdalen in some censuses. By 1910 Joseph and Martha-Magdalen had moved to Hobart. Ten years later, they had seven children of their own, plus a niece and a nephew living with them.
I'm not sure I'm going to have to pay much more attention to this family, as it appears that by 1930 they had moved to Muncie, Indiana.
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*There may have been more, but I did not record them.
Additional Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 3 Feb. 1911.
♦ "Young Lady Surprised." Hobart Gazette 28 May 1920.
