Uncle Adolph

I don't think that I have previously posted this exact, precise view looking north up Center Street from its intersection with Third, in Hobart.


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Per the caption, the postcard is intended to show the post office, which was housed in the late, lamented Guyer building from March 3, 1910 up to February 1923.[1] The building on the right would be the Amazon restaurant. The 1910 Sanborn map shows that, aside from a small storage building on the north side of the Amazon, all other buildings in that block were homes.

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On the verso, we find that we are dealing with another Henning postcard.



The postmark is December 3, 1912. The recipient is Elmer Henning, the five-year-old son of Frank and Bertha Henning.

The sender is his Uncle Adolph — ostensibly; but Adolph was only seven years old at the time (born to Theodore and Minnie Henning in 1905), and I'm not sure that looks like the handwriting of a seven-year-old child. Here's what I think happened: Theodore and Minnie took their family to visit Frank, Bertha, and Elmer; and when they got back home (which may have been their Ross Township farm, or perhaps by 1912 they had moved to Crown Point), Adolph said he wanted to send a postcard to Elmer, so one of his parents or older siblings wrote what he wanted to say. It probably was a thrill for him to send the card, and a thrill for little Elmer to receive it.


Sadly, Adolph died a few months before his 26th birthday, on May 4, 1931 (Indiana Death Certificates).


Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 May 1931.

He is buried in Crown Point's Maplewood Cemetery.


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[1] Dorothy Ballantyne and Robert Adams, Along the Route: A History of Hobart, Indiana, Post Offices and Postmasters (The Hobart Historical Society, Inc., 1979, rev. 1992).

Car Wreck Caught on Camera (1915)

Considering that this happened circa 1915, it was against all odds that the photographer happened to be there beside the road with a camera to capture the moment of impact:


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I have not been able to find out anything about this accident. It was not reported in the Hobart newspapers — surprising, since there must have been injuries, at least to the two men ejected from the car.

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OK, I've had my little joke. Here's the verso:



This gag postcard was made by Alfred Stanley Johnson, the same photographer who created the two 1912 postcards we saw earlier, sent by Herman Harms to his very good friend, Minnie Rossow. I suppose the senders picked this one up on a stop in Ainsworth.

This card is postmarked April 12, with no year. We know the year must be 1915 or later, from the copyright date on the front.

It is addressed to Frank Henning. He had been born in 1880 to Theodore Henning and his first wife, Mary.[1] In 1904 Frank married Bertha Gauger in Lake County, Indiana (Indiana Marriage Collection). Subsequent censuses, 1910 through 1940, show them farming in Union Township, Porter County, so the "Hobart" in their address referred to the post office that handled R.F.D. route #2. Here is their farm in the Union Township plat map of 1921:


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Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Union-1921.jpg.

Their house is still standing. Its address is now 609 W 450 N. It was built in 1921, per the Porter County Assessor's records, so there must have been an earlier house where they lived when they first moved there. An outbuilding dates to "1900," which in assessor parlance tends to mean "a long time ago but nobody remembers exactly when."

Frank and Bertha farmed that land for upwards of three decades. They had two children: a daughter, Margaret, born in 1905, who died before her second birthday; and a son, Elmer, born in 1906. Around 1931, Elmer married Florence Mounce. The 1940 Census showed the young couple, and their son, Harold, living on the farm with Frank and Bertha. By the 1950 Census all had left farming: Frank and Bertha retired to Hobart; Elmer and Florence moved to Valparaiso where both took jobs.

Frank died in 1953 …


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 3 Jan. 1953.

… and Bertha in 1962:


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 3 Feb. 1962.



The postcard's senders were probably Frank's half-sister, Amanda, and her husband, Albert Weiler, whom I talked about in an earlier post.

Albert died of injuries he suffered in an accident on his farm in 1944:


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Hammond Times, 18 Jan. 1944.

A few months later, Amanda sold the farm and its contents:


Hammond Times, 13 Apr. 1944.
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The description of the farm's location sounds like the old Michael Weiler farm shown in my previous post, linked above. It had lost about ten acres — some of that, likely, when the new U.S. 30 bisected the farm.

Amanda survived her husband by 16 years, dying in March 1960. She also survived one of her sons.


We[2] don't know exactly who "Uncle & Aunt Holmstrom" were. I have found a record of a Louise Hennings marrying a Carl Holmstrom in Chicago in 1875, but can't find enough information on her to determine if she was related to our Hennings.

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[1] She and Theodore had been married in Cook County in 1877 and lived in Chicago. Mary died in 1881, before Theodore came to Ross Township.
[2] The Henning family genealogist and I.

Sarah Graham and Isaac Crisman

Early in February 1923, two old-timers passed out of this new world.

Sarah Graham was the mother of Ross Graham, among others. (The "Julian Moran" in her obituary is a misprint for "Julia.") She is buried in Maplewood Cemetery.


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Hobart News 8 Feb. 1923.

Isaac Crisman was more socially prominent; he even had a town named after him. He is buried in McCool Cemetery. He must be some relation to John Crisman of Deep River, but I don't have time to figure it out.

William Prochno's Death Notice

One thing I know about this blog is that it's never going to reach 1958 by its usual agonizingly slow weekly progression. So I'll just post this now — from the Gary Post-Tribune of June 2, 1958:


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I do not know if "his home" at the time was still the farm. Perhaps someday I will try to find a 1957-58 Crown Point directory at the library.

Too Good to Be True

The Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society Museum has a big ledger titled, "Record of Recognizance Bonds," being the record of bonds posted for people charged with various misdeeds in Lake County from the late 1870s to the mid-1890s. Among them is this one dated May 18, 1883:


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Image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Of course, when I saw that name I got all excited. While the notion that the Ainsworth stop on the Grand Trunk Railroad was named for a railroad executive comes only from a 2006 Post-Tribune article by Bob Burns, who qualified it with "reportedly," still I dreamed up a story about this mysterious executive who, after spending time in northwest Indiana in 1880 overseeing the construction of the railroad, became fond of the area, and especially of Cedar Lake; so a couple of years later he took a vacation there — but alas, he chose to fish in an unsportsmanlike manner, and fell into the hands of the law.

That story was too good to be true.

A little investigation into the census records turned up not a railroad executive, but a "laborer" living in Center Township, perhaps in or near Crown Point (since one of his neighbors is a deputy county clerk). Sidney Ainsworth was born circa 1852 in New York, and sometime after 1870 came out to Lake County and got married, not necessarily in that order (1870 Census, 1880 Census). The S.W. Ainsworth who co-signed his bond was his father, a Civil War veteran born circa 1821.

Neither lived long after the gill-net incident. Maplewood Cemetery in Crown Point is the final resting-place of both father and son.


Horace Marble was the Lake County sheriff at the time of this incident, having been elected in 1880. The 1880 Census showed him living in the town of Hobart, working as a "commission merchant," whatever that may be. As we know, his first wife, Mary, rests in Chester Cemetery.

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[12/2/2015 update] Here is Sidney Ainsworth's obituary, from the Lake County Star of May 31, 1889:


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