Easter Greetings

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I know, it doesn't say "Easter," but it says "Greetings" and it's got flowers and it's the best I can do.

The verso reintroduces the mysterious Cora Harms …



… only this time she's in Hobart, not Logansport. I still can't figure out who she is and how she's connected to anyone in this area. I think her maiden name was Dempsey. She worked as a dressmaker until marrying Charles W. Harms in 1907, when she was about 42, if she was born in 1865 as she told the enumerator of the 1910 Census. Then this happened:


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Logansport Pharos-Reporter, 29 May 1917.

Later Logansport directories list her operating a fur and dressmaking business as Cora Dempsey. But I can't find her in censuses or fill in the rest of her story. She may have remarried one or two times.

As for the postcard's sender, Marie Strong — you'd think that with all the Strongs around here I could connect her to someone local, but you'd be wrong. I can't even figure out for sure who she was.

Lulu Is Going to a Big Dance Tonight

About 112 years ago today, Lulu was looking forward with excitement to a "big dance" in the evening.


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I say about 112 years because I'm not completely sure about the postmark. It looks most like 1913 to me, but it could also be 1916 or 1918. Here's a high-resolution scan:



For the sake of completeness, here's the front of the postcard …



… but clearly it's just a generic postcard that merchants could have printed up with the name of their town stamped in the designated space. It was probably cheaper than the postcards with photos of Hobart scenes.


The postcard's recipient, Ada Watts, had been born in 1894 to John and Zilla Watts. The family lived and farmed in Washington Township, Porter County. This 1895 plat map is the earliest I could find showing John and Zilla's farm:


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Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1895Plats/Washington-1895.jpg.


The Watts family had ties to Ross Township, going back at least to 1850. (I am going to have to do a separate post on the Wattses.)

Ada lived on her parents' farm through the 1910 Census, but by 1920 had moved to Valparaiso and was working as a saleswoman. In 1922 she married Eugene Taylor Nowlin. In 1930 the two of them were back in Washington Township, running a dairy farm. The 1940 Census shows them still living on a farm, but Taylor had become an automobile dealer by then. I don't know who was doing the farming: their son, Irvin, was only 11 years old, and Taylor's father, living with them, described himself as a "retired farmer." Ada herself was a "housewife."

Eight years later, Taylor's life was cut short by a railroad accident during a snowstorm:


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"Meets Death at Rail Crossing," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 23 Jan. 1948.

The 1950 Census tells us that the widowed Ada (still in Washington Township) went to work as a cook making lunches in a public school, while Irvin, 21 years old, worked in a steel mill.

In 1959, Ada married Laurence Thatcher.[1] They were together for 21 years — only one year less than her first marriage. Still, when their marriage was ended by her death in 1981, she was buried beside her first husband.


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"Obituaries," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 23 Feb. 1981.

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So that's Ada, our postcard's recipient. What about its sender, Lulu? She hasn't given us her surname, to tell us who she was. We're going to have to guess.

My money is on Lulu Strong. Why? — because that's the only Lulu I know.

But seriously, not only were Lulu and Ada somehow related (Lulu's grandmother had been a Watts), the two young women were friends. For example, I find in my newspaper notes a mention of Lulu Strong making the trip out from Hobart to visit Ada's family in 1911: "Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Guernsey, Fred Hillman, Harry Phillips, Harry Moran, Ross Guernsey and Lulu Strong attended a party at John Watts near Coburg[2] Saturday night. They made the trip by auto."[3]

Lulu Strong would have been about 18 in 1913, when the postcard was sent: prime dancing age. All the more so if the postmark is actually 1916 or 1918. It wasn't until December 1919 that she settled down and became Mrs. John Aley. Which didn't mean that her dancing days were over, anyway.

I hope she had fun at her big dance.


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[1] "Thatcher-Nowlin November Nuptials Just Revealed," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 5 Jan. 1960.
[2] You can see Coburg on the 1895 plat map above. Steve Shook has written up the story of that lost village.
[3] "Personal Mention," Hobart News, 2 Nov. 1911. If there was only one auto involved, it must have been crowded. By the way, "Mrs. Melvin Guernsey" was Lulu's sister, Verna.

Back to 1923 Temporari-Lee

I still have a couple of items from the 1923 newspaper, from back in the good old days when you didn't need an appointment to go to the library. May those days return soon.

Speaking of returning, that is what Lee Thompson, our barber, has done — from Seattle, where he had gone in October 1922. He was just in time to meet his brand-new niece.


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Hobart News, Nov. 29, 1923.

Below that, a surprise birthday party for Asa Strong, who was 54 years old. Born November 24, 1869 (Indiana Death Certificates) and named for his grandfather, he was the first child of Augustus and Sarah (Culver) Strong, who had been married in 1868. In 1900, Asa had married Ida Roper. They lived in Hobart (1920 Census). Mrs. Ross Graham was the former Ruby Roper.

Warning Signs at the Death Crossing

After the recent fatal accident at the Lincoln Highway intersection south of Ainsworth, a private organization put up warning signs, and other steps were taken to improve visibility.


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Hobart Gazette, Aug. 31, 1923.

Two columns over, a couple other stories caught my eye.

I've mentioned Charles Boyd before but never took the time to figure out exactly where his farm was. Here is his land as it appeared in the 1926 Plat Book:


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I don't know exactly where the house and burning barn were.

Below that, we find H.W. Traeger — probably the same man who gave that awful Traeger crossing its name — warning people to stay off not only his land, but "the land known as the Garden City, controlled by" him. Does that mean the former site of the Garden City brickyard, on the east side of the intersection of County Line Road and S.R. 130? It seems likely, with that land being so close to H.W. Traeger's own land. I find it interesting that the Garden City name stuck, although the brickyard had stopped operating long ago.

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Here's the social news from south of Deep River for the last week of August 1923:


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Hobart News, Aug. 30, 1923.

There's Only One Merrillville?

I'm sure everyone who's done online research knows the pain of chasing down wild geese that happen to have the same name as your own goose. There are towns in Iowa and Nebraska called Ainsworth, and both of them still exist, unlike this little Ainsworth of mine, and they clog up my search results. And in looking for Hobart, Indiana, I keep turning up things about towns in Tasmania, New York, Oklahoma, and Washington. The good thing about Merrillville is that there's only one … or so I thought, until I saw the first item in this "South of Deepriver" column:


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Hobart News, Aug. 9, 1923.

Internet research fails to turn up the location of this town in Missouri. It does turn up references from the 19th century to a town called Merrellsville, but no one seems to know exactly where that town was. Google Maps, which identify such obscure places as my Ainsworth, don't acknowledge the existence of any Merrillville or Merrellsville in Missouri.

So if there is a Merrillville in Missouri, it keeps quiet. Very quiet.

Beyond that, the news south of Deepriver is not very thrilling.

Who's Teaching and Who's Being Taught

Here are updates on two young south-of-Deepriver women who embarked on teaching careers.


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Hobart News, July 5, 1923.

Esther Strong had earned her high-school diploma in 1922; the position at the Vincent school was her first.

The last we heard of Esther Guernsey, she was heading off to South Dakota in August 1920. I am a little confused about her parents — it appears she was born to Randolph and Nancy (Hardesty) Guernsey, but after her father's death in 1902 (when Esther was only about two years old[1]), her mother married Randolph's elder brother (by about 13 years), Chester. Nancy went on to have more children with Chester, so there were a lot of step-siblings in the family, but all had the Guernsey name from birth.

Esther Guernsey continued teaching school, I believe, until her marriage in 1933 (in Iowa) to Leslie J. Moreland, after which they located on a farm in Ross Township and she stayed home to care for their two adopted daughters (1940 Census). She is buried in Valparaiso.

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Hobart's budding artist, Dalia Messick, began an eight-week course at the Art Institute of Chicago, according to an item in the "Local Drifts" of the Hobart Gazette of July 6, 1923. She had just completed her freshman year at Hobart High School and had illustrated the 1923 Aurora yearbook.

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[1] Esther and her younger sister were mistakenly omitted from the list of survivors in the Gazette's account of Randolph's death.

Conflict of Interest

I just can't get over the fact that ambulance service used to be provided by funeral homes rather than fire departments or other dedicated emergency responders.


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Hobart News, June 21, 1923

Also, the rural social news from south of Deep River. Ellen Smith, whom Emily Strong helped with housecleaning, was the widow of Cyrus and by now nearly 80 years old. Per the 1920 Census, she lived alone; if she still lived in that big farmhouse, I expect she could use help in cleaning it.

South of Deepriver, June 7, 1923

Social news from the countryside.


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Hobart News, June 7, 1923

We previously encountered the story about little Vernon Fauser.

Over in the "Local and Personal" column, we find Ethel Paine traveling Indianapolis for the graduation of her daughter, Alice … who remained there to get even more educated.

Howard H. Smith and the Union Center Cemetery

The "South of Deepriver" community was shocked when the news began to spread on the morning of April 20, 1923, that Howard H. Smith had died in his sleep.


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Hobart News, April 26, 1923.

"A large procession followed the remains to their last resting place in the Union Center cemetery" — where??? I asked myself, never having heard of such a place. But then I remembered that little cemetery marked on plat maps near the location of the Walnut Gardens. So I consulted the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society's listing of Union Township cemeteries, and found it there among the "Small Cemeteries" with this information: "The [Union Center] cemetery could not be found in 1994. It was located on the northeast corner of Route 30 and 600 W. '… When Hiway 30 was built any stones left there were buried or were moved.'"[1]

Naturally my mind formed a picture of Howard H. Smith lying there at the corner of Route 30 and 600 W, trying to get some eternal sleep beneath the rumbling traffic of Route 30.

However, a little more investigation convinced me that the News simply got their information wrong, and that Howard has been resting peacefully in Mosier Cemetery all these years, where his death certificate and the April 27 Gazette placed him …


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Hobart Gazette, April 27, 1923.

… and where today you can find his grave marker.

If I live long enough to read the microfilm from when Route 30 came through, I hope to learn more details about what happened to the Union Center Cemetery.

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Howard's death notice partially answers the question of what happened to his siblings. Mildred Smith had married John Dick in 1898 (Indiana Marriage Collection); the 1920 Census shows them farming in Porter Township, with a son (Sherman) and a daughter (Margaret). Abbie and Rudie apparently died before Howard — but when, and where they are buried, I do not know.


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[1] NWIGS does not identify the source of that last sentence.

Dance on the Dan Kraft Farm

Here's a good-times post. Let's start off with an ad for a dance to be held on the Dan Kraft farm …


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Hobart News, April 29, 1923.


… which naturally leads me to wonder where the Dan Kraft farm was. Of course I thought of that wonderful brick house on the northeast corner of County Line Road and Cleveland/700 N; that's a Kraft house. But looking over the Porter County plat maps, I find that's not the right Kraft house — it belonged to Dan's brother, Fred. Dan's farm was a bit further northeast:


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Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Portage-1921.jpg.


I am not sure that Dan Kraft actually resided on his farm in 1923. He was about 75 by then, retirement age even in that hard-working era. The 1920 Census seems to have counted him twice: once as a dairy farmer on his farm in Portage Township; and again as a retired resident of Hobart.


Below the Kraft ad in the same column, we learn of a very large party for a 14-year-old. Apparently Louis and Lena Wojahn had moved back to Ainsworth from Hobart since 1917.

I believe this Wojahn house is still standing, but it sits so far from the road that you can't really see it as you drive by.

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Elsewhere in the same issue, a "South of Deepriver" column …


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Hobart News, April 19, 1923.


… with a couple of unfamiliar names — King and Lakotski. I can't identify any of them for certain.

South of Deepriver, March 29, 1923

My part-time job has been trying to be full-time lately. So here's a "South of Deepriver" column to save me the trouble of writing a real post.


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Hobart News, Mar. 29, 1923.



One thing these columns are good for is to remind me who's living in the area.

South of Deepriver, March 22, 1923

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Hobart News 23 March 1923.


Among all the other social news, we find Maybelle Guernsey marrying Lloyd Moreland of Sedley, who thus far has figured in this blog only as a visitor in other "South of Deepriver" columns. But looking into his background a little, I find that his family goes back to the 1870s in Union Township, Porter County. His grandparents were Joshua and Margaret Anna. I believe that Joshua, born in Ohio in 1834 (Indiana Death Certificates), shows up in Union Township in the 1870 Census with his name spelled Moorland. The following year he went back to Ohio to marry his sweetheart, Margaret Anna McConkey.[1]

The young couple probably returned to Indiana soon after their marriage. The 1876 plat map for Union Township shows a J. Moreland owning a nice big parcel of land not far southeast of where Sedley would be after the Grand Trunk Railroad came through.

Around 1874, Joshua and Margaret had a son named Harrison (1880 Census). In 1896, Harrison married Jessie Wilson (Indiana Marriage Collection). Their son Lloyd was born in 1898 (Indiana Death Certificates).

Per the Union Township plat map of 1921, Harrison Moreland owned nearly 200 acres around Sedley.


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


The 1930 Census shows Lloyd and Maybelle farming rented land in roughly the same vicinity (to judge by their neighbors); it may have been his father's land. By then they had three children.


To the left of the "South of Deepriver" column is an open letter from William O. Sievert. He may or may not be somehow related to the Ainsworth-area Sieverts — I don't know. I believe he was a Hobart resident; the 1920 Census shows a 25-year-old steel-mill employee by that name in Hobart with his widowed mother, Anna. The Charles Carlson (who was allegedly to blame for the accident) was a son of Swan Peter and Hedwig Carlson, and per the 1920 Census lived in Ross Township, farming on part of the old Carlson place on S.R. 51, roughly across S.R. 51 from the present-day Indian Ridge Golf Course.

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[1] Ancestry.com. Ohio, County Marriages, 1774-1993 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016. Original data: Marriage Records. Ohio Marriages. FamilySearch, Salt Lake City, UT.

South of Deepriver, March 15, 1923

Among all the usual visiting going on in southern Ross Township, I am introduced to a connection between the Hurlburt-Smith family and the Ripley family that I didn’t know about.


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Hobart News 15 Mar. 1923.

Aside from a couple of passing mentions of the surname Ripley — back when I was figuring out who those south-of-Deepriver Smiths were, and in a 1920 "South of Deepriver" column — I have thoroughly ignored the Ripleys. That name shows up a couple more times in my notes, but never to tell of the Ripleys doing anything more interesting than being related to Milan Hurlburt and Rachel (Hurlburt) Smith. I am inclined to continue ignoring them.

However, I should do my duty as an amateur historian and at least get some of the basics. Per the Indiana Marriage Collection, Horace Ripley married Frances Hurlburt in Lake County, Indiana, on June 24, 1873. They were married by Horace Marble, J.P.

How on earth they ever met, I do not know, since Horace Ripley, aka "Hod," was born in Canada, raised in Wisconsin, and then moved to Missouri, according to his obituary on findagrave.com.

Frances Hurlburt Ripley was born March 25, 1852, according to her death certificate. Her parents were Jacob and Susan* (Perry Sheffield) Hurlburt.

What little information I have suggests that the Ripley presence in this area was never long-term, consisting only in visits to the Hurlburts and Smiths.

Now I've done my duty and can go back to ignoring the Ripleys.

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The shower for Bertha Fisher, also mentioned in the next column to the right, reminds us of the existence of Hubert Hahn.

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*Frances' death certificate gives her mother's name as "Jane," but I believe that is a mistake.

South of Deepriver, March 1923

Much innocent sociability in the countryside.


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Hobart News 8 Mar. 1923.

"The Raschka barn near Leroy" might have belonged to Frank and George, William's brothers.

Arthur Bowman's radio sounds more like a ham set than something to receive commercial broadcasts — but then again, for all I know about radios, it might have done both.

A Chopping Bee

In December 1922, the men of the South of Deepriver neighborhood got together and held a "chopping bee" to supply Jim Jeffrey with stove wood for the winter — as Jim was in no condition to chop wood for himself, with a twice-broken leg.


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Hobart News 21 Dec. 1922.

I've paid so little attention to the Prescott family that I had to go look them up to remind myself that Mrs. John Prescott was born Carrie Sturtevant.


Over in the left-hand column, the Central Drug Store in downtown Hobart was selling popular recordings. I've never heard of either "Indiana Lullaby" or "Three O'Clock in the Morning" before. I guess I need to get out more.

A Trip to Casper

Late in the summer of 1922, Ella Rossow took a ten-day vacation to Casper, Wyoming …


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Hobart News 7 Sept. 1922.

… which would explain this postcard:


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Postcard courtesy of Eldon Harms.



"Just like Main St. in Hobart," she wrote to her sister, Minnie Harms.

By the time Minnie received this postcard, she was probably already worried about six-year-old Rheinhart's bad sore throat. But by the time Aunt Ella came back, Rheinhart was home from the hospital, minus his tonsils and adenoids.


And with the new school year, Esther Strong took up her first teaching position, at the Vincent school.

South of Deepriver, August 1922

Today is South-of-Deepriver Day, also known as Blogger-Takes-a-Nap Day.


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Hobart News 31 Aug. 1922.

And at the Niksches' Deep River Hall, an old-time dance, whatever that meant in 1922.

South of Deepriver

Thank goodness for these South of Deepriver columns, they save me from having to write a real post.


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Hobart News 10 Aug. 1922.

South of Deepriver

Random bits from the countryside south of Deepriver, late July-early August 1922.


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Hobart News 3 Aug. 1922

I don't know exactly what a separator canvas is, but the wording of that item suggests that the farmers of southeastern Ross Township had chipped in to buy themselves a communal farm machine — a sensible thing to do — and it was getting a workout in that summer's wheat threshing.

… Here's a little article about a threshing machine that has a separator and a canvas, somehow or another.


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From the Chilton Tractor Journal, Vol VIII, No. 4 (April 1, 1922). Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=xsZMAQAAMAAJ&lpg=RA3-PA14&ots=pSADxxAJwL&pg=RA3-PA14&ci=80%2C816%2C899%2C500&source=bookclip#v=onepage&q&f=false.

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Elsewhere in the August 3, 1922 issue of the News, we find out that the strikebreaker has still not recovered …



… and among the familiar names in the second column, we also find Miss Jeanette Peterson, daughter of Lena and George. The Hugo Zobjeck at Camp Knox in Kentucky was Hugo Jr., now about 17 years old.

In the third column are a couple of obituaries. The first concerns the untimely death of Ida (Heck) Carlson, who probably grew up on the old Heck place. The second brings me to consider the Wilson family of Union Township, Porter County, whom I have considered very little up to now. Mrs. Jane Harwood would have been Aunt Jane to "Miss Leola Wilson of Blachly's corners," and also, I believe, to Ralph Wilson, who in his youth took music lessons from Ainsworth's own Hugh Dotzer ("Ainsworth Pick-Ups," Hobart Gazette 6 Jan. 1905). In my notes and in the blog, I find several references to Wilsons, and some day when I retire and have time on my hands, perhaps I shall investigate which of them belonged to the Wilson family of Union Township.

Here is the farm of Jane's parents, Amos and Hannah Wilson, as it appeared on the 1876 plat map:


From http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1876Plats/Union-1876.jpg, courtesy of Steven R. Shook.

This Is Why He Couldn't Have a Gas Station

While the human race exists, there will be jerks. At the time we are concerned with — 1922 — jerks had found a relatively new way to be jerks, involving that relatively recent invention, the gas station. But already this avatar of jerkitude was so well known that the neighbors of John Kibler's triangle rose up to prevent his building a gas station where jerks could be jerks.


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Hobart News 13 July 1922.

Also, news from the countryside south of Deepriver, some of it involving huckleberries in a way that I interpret to mean they grew wild around here. News to me!