W.G. Haan Staff

We've seen these people before. Now we get to see them in front of the great emptiness that used to inhabit the west side of State Road 51, opposite the W.G. Haan school.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Notes on the back of the original identify them as "Mr. Garland, Mrs. Zieseniss, Miss Frame, Miss Tabor."

Mr. Garland was, I believe, George Bronson Garland, born in 1904. I can find him locally in the 1930 Census, but not at all after that. If I've found the right person, he married a woman named Esta, and they both rest in Adams County, Indiana.

Ella Zieseniss was born Ella Kretschmar (Indiana Death Certificates) in 1899. She married Wayland Zieseniss, a farmer, about 1929 (1930 Census). She became a schoolteacher after Wayland's untimely death in July 1930 (Indiana Death Certificates). More than half a century later, she joined her husband in Maplewood Cemetery, in Crown Point.

Allene Frame was born in 1915 to James and Rose (Stegmeier) Frame (Indiana Birth Certificates). She is the only one of these four whom I can find in the 1940 Census. At that time she was a teacher, single and living with her parents, but according to information transcribed from her 2010 obituary on Ancestry.com, the following year she married George Chermak, and they had five children.

Bernice Tabor descended from a long line of locals. The 1850 Census shows her great-grandparents, George and Chloe, living in Ross Township near the Guernseys and Strongs (in the neighborhood that would eventually be chronicled in the "South of Deepriver" columns). In their household is a five-year-old Charles — Bernice's grandfather. In 1865 Charles married Margaret Hooseline (Indiana Marriage Collection), and in 1884 they became the parents of Grover Cleveland "Cleve" Tabor. Cleve married Clara Klemm in 1908 (id.), and eight years later Bernice came into the world. According to information on findagrave.com, after some years of teaching, Bernice married Dr. Arthur Nelson (a chiropractor), and operated the Hobart Employment Agency at 449 E. Third Street.

Cutting the Midnight Hair

Deep in the cold silent darkness of Hobart, in the autumn of 1919 and the winter of your soul, you reach that point where only a shave and a haircut can restore your will to live. Where can you go? To whom can you turn?

To pretty well any of the local barbers, apparently. Just rouse them out of bed and they will take care of you in their sanitary, up-to-date barbershop whenever you like.

The Hobart barbers have done away with closing hours, and are now working whenever and as long as customers wish work done. Lawrence Niksch is again working all alone, his barber having gone to the steel mills where he can make more money. E.E. McAdams is helping Otto Sizelove at the former Wilder shop, and O.C. Mize is all alone. Since Mr. Brown left about a month ago Mr. Mize has added some new fixtures to his place and now has one of the most sanitary and up-to-date shops in the Calumet region.

Which is great for the hairy men of Hobart, but a hard life for barbers.

♦    ♦    ♦
A happier announcement moves me to say a few words about James and Rosa Frame …


(Click on images to enlarge)

… who, if they really had wanted to be mentioned in this blog, should have been less orderly and law-abiding. However, they had the foresight to suffer some misfortune, in the form of Rosa's serious illness early on in their marriage — but I'm getting ahead of myself.

James was born in November 1870, Rosa Stegmeier in July 1874; both in Indiana, and Rosa probably on the land where she and her husband would be farming in 1926:



They married in 1898.

We first hear of Rosa's illness in early September 1904, when she was "reported very low," which in the idiom of the time meant seriously ill. Two weeks later she was in the "Logansport asylum," i.e., Longcliff Hospital — but the "very low" suggests it was her physical, not mental, health at issue, so I'm guessing she had tuberculosis.

Unlike so many of the tuberculosis cases we've encountered so far, Rosa's had a happy ending: she recovered. The 1910 census found her back home, the mother of a two-year-old boy, Irvin (though she had borne and lost another child at some point). In 1915 she gave birth to a daughter, Allene or Aline (who eventually became a teacher at the W.G. Haan school).

Those were the high, or low, points of the Frames' life so far. Other than that, they quietly went about farming and socializing, and obviously had plenty of friends to celebrate James' birthday in 1919.

I don't understand how his 50th birthday could fall in 1919, when he himself told the 1900 census-taker that he was born in November 1870, but that may be a mistake on the part of the News. And anyway, when 35 friends turn up at your door to celebrate your birthday, you don't fuss about the details.


Sources:
♦ 1874 Plat Map.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ "Ainsworth Pick-Ups." Hobart Gazette 9 Sept. 1904; 23 Sept. 1904.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 4 Dec. 1919.