Wauhob Lake

I never heard of Lake Wahob, or Wauhob Lake as it seems to be called now, until Charles Lee took a vacation there with family and friends in early July 1922.


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Hobart News 13 July 1922.

Wauhob Lake is in Liberty Township, Porter County:



(Elsewhere on the same page, we find the summer visiting of the Bullock-Killigrew-Halladay crowd.)


Charles and Anna Lee returned from their vacation to show Charles' brother, mother, and sister around Hobart.


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I suppose J.W. Lee was the 49-year-old John W. Lee who showed up in the 1920 Census in Hominy, Oklahoma, working as a superintendent at a gas company. The rest of the genealogy I shall have to leave to the Lee family.

On the page above, we see that Henry Harms, Sr. suffered some wind damage to the barn on his farm, then occupied by the Herman and Minnie Harms family.

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Here's what August 1922 held for Charles' plumbing firm: "Lee & Rhodes submitted a bid of $198.50 for paying 330 feet of water pipe on Linda street, or to do the work for $132 if the city furnishes the pipe. Supt. Wheaton was directed to purchase the material and have the extension made at once." ("City Council Proceedings," Hobart Gazette 18 Aug. 1922.)

New Location for Old Schoolhouse

In April 1922 came the time for Hobart's first schoolhouse to make way for a new Masonic hall.


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Hobart Gazette 28 Apr. 1922.

The News reported on the schoolhouse's move a little more quietly.


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"Local and Personal," Hobart News 27 Apr. 1922.

The family who had occupied the old schoolhouse until its move may have included Irene Slaughter, who appeared in the 1920 Census as a 37-year-old widow supporting herself by dressmaking; she was then living alone in a rented house on Center Street near the Mackey home. (In an overwhelmingly white town, she was the only person in that vicinity with a "B" marked in the "Color or Race" column.)


Above that item, we learn that William Newman (whoever he may have been) had visited "Hogan" Zobjeck, better known as Hugo, whose Porter County farm I still have not identified.

Reuben George Bridle

I have a feeling that I might have more in my notes about Reuben Bridle if I had paid more attention while reading the microfilm. Now it's too late; poor Reuben is dead.


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Hobart News 6 Apr. 1922.

The article above says that Reuben bought a farm; if that is true, I have yet to find it. The 1900 Census shows him farming rented land east of Ainsworth. We have already seen his daughters, Blanche and Edith, attending school in 1900-01 with other east-of-Ainsworth children. (Blanche became Mrs. Earl T. Ramsey in October 1911; Edith married Joseph Glynn a year later; and their brother James had married Fredona Koch of Hobart in March 1904. I don't know about the other children.)

This article has him living on a farm south of Hobart for 17 years; the Gazette says 15 years. Perhaps if I went back and read the newspapers more carefully, I would find him arriving. I've already found him departing, in the autumn of 1907, when he held a public sale on the farm "one and one-quarter miles north of Deepriver on the county line road" to dispose of livestock, farming implements and various household goods.

The next autumn, this ad appeared in the Gazette: "FOR RENT. — A 200-acre dairy farm on Porter county line about a mile north of Deepriver. Enquire of R. Bridle, Hobart, or Mrs. James Lennerts, Valparaiso, Ind." I cannot find any farm ascribed to James Lennerts on the plat maps, but I do find one belonging to James Leonard or his estate, and it's in the proper location to have been the Bridles' home.


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1906 Union Township plat map, from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1906Plats/Union-1906.jpg, courtesy of Steven R. Shook. I have drawn in an additional 40-acre parcel in Ross Township, shown on the 1908 Plat Map.

The Gazette obituary has Reuben running an ice business for two years after moving to Hobart, which I believe is true — in January 1909 we hear that "R. Bridle has succeeded in filling his ice house, which holds about three thousand tons. The ice is about eleven inches thick and the quality is pronounced the best in many years." After quitting the ice business, according to the Gazette, Reuben bought a farm and resumed farming for a while before retiring completely, which may be true but I have no other source backing that up.

Because of the Casper connection (brought to my attention by that 1900-01 school souvenir and the 1900 Census, which showed grandchildren named Vivian and Clarence Casper in the Bridle household), I was intrigued by the obituary's mention of Mr. and Mrs. Claus Casper of Chicago, who attended the funeral. They showed up in the 1910 Census in Chicago with a 17-year-old daughter, Vivian; no mention of a Clarence, though.* Mrs. Claus — her name was Rose — said she had only one child and that child was still living. I suppose this could have been Clarence, who was one year younger than Vivian. If I'm reading the enumerator's notes correctly, this marriage was the second for both Claus and Rose. So, I can theorize that Claus' first wife was one of the two deceased Bridle children, who gave birth to Vivian and then died; Claus quickly remarried and produced Clarence. The only problem is the fact that in the 1900 Census, when Clarence and Vivian (seven years old) showed up in the Bridle household, Rose reported having no children. So any child of hers living in 1910 would have been ten or fewer years old — really too young to have left home, unless that child was staying with another grandparent somewhere. Either that, or a mistake on a census is what's needed to make my theory work.

I don't know if the Mr. and Mrs. George Haggerty who attended the funeral were any relation to Reuben, but in 1910 a George "Hegerty" showed up as a servant in the Bridle household.

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*[9/1/2015 update] I have since learned that Clarence was not living by the 1910 census. From the "Mortuary Record" of the Hobart Gazette of February 19, 1904:

Clarence Casper, grandson of Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Bridle, died last week Thursday, Feb. 11, of diphtheria, aged about 9 years. A private funeral was held on Friday following. The boy and a sister whose father lives in Chicago have lived with their grandparents since the death of their mother.

According to the NWIGS listing, Clarence is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, with dates on his grave marker of 1894 to 1903.

Additional Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ "Death of Reuben Bridle." Hobart Gazette 7 Apr. 1922.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 29 Nov. 1907.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 1 Apr. 1904; 18 Sept. 1908; 22 Jan. 1909.

On His Toes!

John and Lillian Call had been living in a rented home in Hobart when the 1920 census came around and, I suppose, when their first child was born. In the spring of 1921 they bought their own house and their own lot, but it seems the two were not at first in the same place. It was easier to bring the house to the lot than vice versa … which is not to say it was easy to move the house.


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Also, a little news of other people we know, including a new way to spell Grabowski, but we're going to stick with the old way. And Theodore Rossow's little daughter was sick. Who (I asked myself) was Theodore Rossow? I believe he was "Uncle Theodore" to our Minnie Rossow Harms, being her father's brother … only I don't know what his family was doing "southwest" of Hobart, since the censuses (1910 through 1930) show them living on their own land in Union Township, Porter County; the 1921 plat map of Union Township shows this Rossow farm in the northwest corner of Union Township, which is southeast of Hobart. Perhaps the "southwest" in the News item was a misprint.


To return for a moment to the Calls' house-moving — while the item above suggests it was expensive, we must go to a second item on another page to find out that it actually cost John much more than he'd expected:




Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 5 May 1921.

George's New Dodge

Yet another item from the August 28, 1919 News! Our friend, George Sauter, gets a new van to go with his new grocery store.


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I think this might be the van in question:


Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The Gazette went so far as to call it "beautiful."

(By the way, I wonder if the Earl Ramsey mentioned in the item just below the one about George's van has any relation to the elusive Wm. Ramsey?)


Sources:
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 28 Aug. 1919.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 29 Aug. 1919.

Carrie Zobjeck and Friend (WWI-Era Photo Album)

Because yesterday we had news of Mary Zobjeck's death, today let's leave aside the Epworth League for a moment and look at a photo of one of Mary's daughters, Carrie:


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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The handwritten note behind this photo reads:

Carrie Zobject & Friend June – Wm Ramsay's Back Yard 1918

Carrie, the oldest of the Zobjeck children, was born in 1890, so in this photo she would be about 28. In March 1919 she married Julius Jorden (or Jordan) and the 1920 census shows the young couple with their infant daughter living in the household of her widowed father, crowded in with her seven siblings.

Poor Helen is known to posterity only as Carrie's friend.

On the same page we find this photo:



The handwritten note behind this one reads:

Jenning's Girl
June 1918
Wm Ramseys Back Yard

"Jenning's Girl" is a mystery. So too is William, or Bill, Ramsey, whose missing photo we've already encountered. Wherever he lived, it seems to have been a nice location, bordering on a lake, and if that is his house in the background, it's quite substantial.

John Gruel's Woods (WWI-Era Photo Album)

Perhaps while hunting the mighty woodchuck in John Gruel's woods, "Myself" took this photograph. The handwritten note behind it reads:

June 1918
North of Ainsworth
J. Gruels Woods

… Those look more like cows than trees to me, but what do I know?


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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

On the same page, beneath a blank space where a photo once was, this caption:



Bill is a mystery.