Now, About All Those Other Guys

Mayor Sherman Henderson's instructions to Police Chief Fred Rose in early April 1923 testified that, in spite of all those recent acquittals, plenty of people in Hobart were selling and buying vice in the form of liquor and gambling.


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Hobart News, April 5, 1923.

I had to ask Professor Google what punch boards are. In his letter, His Honor sounds as if he were still mad about losing money on them.[1]

In the left-hand column, we find another type of eradication underway, as local cattle were getting tested for tuberculosis, and many failing.


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[1] I'm kidding.

Of Toilets Condemned and Toilets Installed

During 1922, Hobart had seen a splendid year's growth in its toilets.


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Hobart News 4 Jan. 1923.

In unrelated news, Leona Niksch's 15th birthday party was probably taking place in the house on her parents' farm along the Lincoln Highway.

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Elsewhere in the same issue of the News, we find John Harms taking office as Hobart Township Assessor. I believe his account book is at the museum and maybe one of these years we will get around to photographing it.


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Hobart News 4 Jan. 1923.

Also, another plane falling out of the sky, somewhere southeast of where the new roundabout is. The Peddicord farm straddled the Hobart-Ross Township line in that area. I think the "Wm. Sonntag home" was no longer occupied by Wm. Sonntag, but was somewhere near the intersection of S.R. 51 and 61st Avenue.

Various Stages of Quitting Farming

This first public-sale announcement shows that I was sent on a wild-goose chase a year ago when I came across an item in the News where "Hoffman" was spelled "Huffman" and the Sonntags had just bought the Emma Shearer farm.


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Hobart News 5 Oct. 1922.

The John G. Hoffman farm is the one I marked in this post, when it was owned by John's son, Henry. No plat map shows that parcel owned by Mike Ormond, but the 1908 Plat Map of Ross Township shows it owned by Margaret Doyle, who I believe was Mike's sister (their respective death certificates show the same parents (Indiana Death Certificates), and the 1870 Census shows them living in the same household). Straddling the border between Hobart and Ross Townships, the Ormond/Hoffman farm comprised 160 acres.

And that is where the Carl and Anna Sonntag were living when they downsized to the Emma Shearer* farm.

I am not sure how large the Emma Shearer farm was in 1922. The 1908 Plat Map shows a 36.83-acre parcel owned by E. Shearer, which probably stands for Emma (though it could stand for Elijah, Emma's father, who died in 1902):


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The 50-acre parcel immediately north of that is ascribed to Sophia Shearer, Emma's mother, who died in 1907. The 1926 Plat Book shows Carl and Anna Sonntag's farm spreading over both those parcels. (I think the Sonntag farm is the location of Hobart's gigantic new high school.)

So I'm not sure how much of a downsize it actually was, but at any rate they were quitting dairy farming. (I suppose they were udderly tired of it.)


The second public sale advertised in the News was being held by Maude Hardesty. Recently widowed, with a new baby and several young children to raise on her own, Maude would have been hard pressed to supervise a farm as well. Whether she intended to sell the land as well as the livestock and farming implements remains to be seen. I don't know for sure where her farm was. If we look at the Union Township plat map from 1921, we see Hardesty farms all over the place, but no John N. Hardesty farm; we do, however, see a J.W. Hardesty farm:


Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Union-1921.jpg, courtesy of Steven Shook.

In the 1906 plat map, that initial looks more like an N. The 1928 plat map shows a non-Hardesty owning that land. So my current theory is that that was Maude's farm and she sold it before 1928.

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Two weeks later, we find Charles Shults declaring that he intended to quit farming altogether:


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Hobart News 19 Oct. 1922.

This looks like the William Springman farm in 1921:


Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Union-1921.jpg, courtesy of Steven Shook.

I do not know what, if any, relationship Charles Shults had to Ainsworth's William Shults — I suspect they were brothers, but I'm going to need somebody's obituary to confirm that.

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*The News was using her maiden name, which Emma herself may not have used at that time. I have recently come across some interesting information about Emma's activities in her younger days, which I will post soon.


Additional Sources:
♦ 1870 Census.
♦ Indiana Death Certificates.
♦ Indiana WPA Death Records Index.

Carl Sonntag

From the "Local and Personal" column of the Hobart News of April 20, 1922:

Carl Sonntag, who resides on the Huffman farm southeast of Hobart, has recently purchased the Emma Shearer farm. It is his intention, we are informed to remain on the Huffman farm until the expiration of his rental lease of the place next spring, when he will take possession of his new residence.

I'm not aware of L.R. Huffman owning any land in Lake County, so Carl must have moved onto the Porter County Huffman farm — after 1920, when the census records him living on rented land in Ross Township.

At that time Carl was 34 years old, a German immigrant, married to Anna (maiden name unknown), with an infant son, Arthur. I've seen the Sonntag name around, but never with "Carl" in front of it, and yet he was related to many of the Sonntags, including Martha, who was his niece — or so I gather from his 1961 obituary:

Carl W. Sonntag, 75, of 2585 Willowdale road, a Portage resident for 33* years, died Wednesday in Gary Mercy hospital.

Born Oct. 24, 1885, he retired from the Gary sheet and Tin mill eight years ago.

Surviving are his widow, Anna; a daughter, Mrs. Marie Kuzak of Portage; a son, Arthur of East Gary; five sisters, Mrs. Bertha Moele [or Moehl], Mrs. Emma Baessler, Mrs. Minnie Maier, Mrs. Lena Judge and Mrs. Martha Luke, all of Hobart; two brothers, William of Hobart and Ernest of Fairchild, Wis.; a grandchild and a step-grandchild.

Services will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday in Redeemer Lutheran church, East Gary. The Rev. Leonard Fiene will officiate, and burial will be in Calvary cemetery.

(From "Deaths," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso) 5 Jan. 1961, newspaperarchive.com.)

Well, he's got until the spring of 1923 to stay on the Huffman farm and make Ainsworth-area news.

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*I may have misread this number; it is not clear in the on-line copy of the newspaper.

Martha Sonntag

From the Busse autograph collection.

Here we go again with the green leaves upon the pine.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Martha was living in Hobart Township when she signed Lena's album, but she had once lived "near Ainsworth," in the words of the Gazette, and the 1900 census also shows the family somewhere roughly south of the Ainsworth-Deep River area (if I can judge correctly by their neighbors), farming rented land. The family then consisted of William and Alvina Sonntag and their seven children, who ranged in age from late teens* down to the five-year-old Martha — the baby of the family, and the only one not born in Germany.

In February 1903, the Sonntags moved to Hobart Township, to rent the "Christian Heck farm," which lay approximately where Tenth Street meets S. Decatur Street (aka Clay, aka Arizona). By 1908 they had moved to "the Oliver Hayward farm southwest of town," and in 1910 (judging by their neighbors in the census), they were still living there, or near there, although in the spring of 1908 they had bought the "Geo. Stoeckert thirty-four acres southeast of town." (I don't know. Look at the 1908 Plat Map and drawn your own conclusions.) By 1920, it appears that William and Alvina had retired from farming and moved to a home on Lake Street; of all their children, only Martha remained with them, single and employed as a saleslady at some unspecified department store. And beyond that, I lose track of her.

Well, I don't have a picture of Martha, so how about a story about her father's horse accident at Ainsworth?


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*The census is almost illegible on that point. I'm not sure it's possible for Selma to be "4," as Ancestry.com has it, because someone named Selma Sonntag married in 1906. (See "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 26 Oct. 1906.)


Sources:
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1908 Plat Map.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 7 Aug. 1903; 3 Apr. 1908.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 13 Feb. 1903.

Overrun with Hunters and Dogs

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This inhospitable notice, published on the front page of both local papers, was provoked by the area's growing population, as the News explained:

Farmers in this locality have become tired and disgusted with having their farms overrun with hunting parties with dogs, and have decided to put a stop to the practice. As the Calumet region grows, the hunters naturally increase until they have become a nuisance. A number of names appear in this issue of The News warning hunters to keep off their farms. It may be well for hunters to heed this notice or someone will pay a heavy fine.

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The "Births" column below the warning to hunters reports good news for some old friends, Charles and Amelia Gernenz — a new addition to the family. It's reported as a son, but later censuses seem to indicate it was in fact a daughter, Bertha.


Sources:
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ "Births." Hobart Gazette 14 Nov. 1919.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 13 Nov. 1919.
♦ "Notice." Hobart News 13 Nov. 1919.
♦ "Warning to Hunters." Hobart Gazette 14 Nov. 1919.

Mr. Baessler Buys the Farm

And, for a change, we have a long-timer coming into the Ainsworth area: Michael Baessler, Jr. That is to say, I have hopes of his being a long-timer — his name will still be on that farm when the 1939 Plat Book goes to press, and I call 20 years a fairly long time,* and furthermore I may yet learn that he owned the land even longer than that.

The land in question is a parcel of about 30 acres on the north side of the Lincoln Highway, just west of the Village of Deep River.


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Michael bought the land from Charles Granzow. Charles had bought it nine years earlier from Mary Giese, widow of August Giese. The Gieses owned the land as early as 1891, but I don't know when they bought it. In 1874 it appears that the land was owned by some member of the Wood family.

Anyway, Charles Granzow decided he'd rather live in Hobart, so he put the farm up for sale. Michael decided he wanted a smaller farm than his father's old place, where he'd been farming, so he bought Charles' 30 acres, and sold off some of his livestock and equipment in preparation for the downsizing.

The old Baessler farm was just over the line in Porter County. I don't know when the family arrived there — sometime between 1855 (when Michael Sr. came over from Germany) and 1870. I'm having a hard time figuring out how many wives Michael Sr. had. In 1870 he was married to a Wilhelmina; in 1880 his wife's name was Lowesia, but she was the same age as Wilhelmina would have been. Lowesia was Michael Jr.'s mother (or maybe they both were). By 1890 Lowesia and Wilhelmina were dead (or was dead), and Michael Sr. married Johanna, widow of John Schumacher and mother of Augusta Schumacher Sauter Fiester. Michael Jr.'s older brother, John, had been farming in the Ainsworth vicinity for some time. In 1915 John's daughter Minnie married Henry Bodamer, George's son and Ben's nephew.**

So now we have Michael Jr. and his nice little family joining the population of the Ainsworth-Deep River area. In 1918 Michael Jr. was about 43 years old. He and his 40-year-old wife, Emma (maiden name unknown) had been married since 1899, and had four children, Irma, Walter, Martha and Helen, ranging in age from 17 to about two.

I don't know much about them. Since I haven't heard of any scandal in the family, I'll assume for the moment that they are the sort of respectable, law-abiding and fortunate people who make for very boring blogs. But we can always hope for better things.

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*Except when it applies to me. I moved here 20 years ago, and I'm a newbie.
**I'm so glad I'm not a genealogist.

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[8/25/2013 update: The Dewell Family archivist writes in with the following information:

My research indicates that the first wife of Michael Baessler Sr (1839-1920) was Wilhelmine Stutman (Stuthman, Stuttman). I believe she was the eldest sister of Anna Stutman who was married to Frederick Schavey. So Henry C. Schavey and Michael Baessler Jr were cousins.

It appears that all these guys traded farms among cousins, sons, and every relative they could find.

I think Michael Baessler Sr did have three wives. 1) Wilhelmine (1847-1875), 2 ) Louisa Hendricks (1841-1889) and 3) Johanna Schumacher (1835-1913).

Also, the Indiana Marriage lists show that Michael Baessler Jr's wife was Emma Sonntag. They married 1 Oct 1898 in Lake County.

Sources:
♦ 1870 Census.
♦ 1874 Plat Map.
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ 1939 Plat Book.
♦ "Bodamer-Baessler." Hobart Gazette 15 Oct. 1915.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 17 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 25 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Mrs. Baessler Passes Away." Hobart Gazette 6 June 1913.
♦ "Public Sale." Hobart Gazette 18 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Public Sale." Hobart News 17 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Public Sale." Hobart News 24 Jan. 1918.