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.

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.

Back in '02, When the Vincent School Burned

Here's an interesting little event that I didn't know enough to pay attention to the first time I was reading through the 1902 microfilm.


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Hobart Gazette 28 Feb. 1902.

So when Gust Lindborg "bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse" in 1912 — assuming "Sullivan" and "Vincent" are two names for the same school — it wasn't really all that old, was it? — nine or ten years.

The property records for the former Vincent schoolhouse still standing at Clay St. and Harms Rd. give a construction date of 1925. If that's correct (and assuming Sullivan = Vincent), why was the Vincent school building available for purchase in 1912? Were they building a new wooden one then? This is getting complicated.

I wish the story had identified "Miss Burge" better. In the 1900 Census, (Winfield) Scott and Mary Burge had six daughters and two sons living at home. I suppose either of the two eldest daughters, May (born circa 1881) and Bertha (born circa 1882), could have become a teacher by 1902, and maybe even the next eldest, Libbie (born ca. 1885). The census shows the Burges owning their own farm; my guess at its location is marked on this image from the 1908 Plat Map, which also shows how conveniently close for the burned-out students the Goodrich house was.


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The yellow X marks the present location of the brick house that used to be the Vincent schoolhouse. This map places the 1908 schoolhouse* on the north side of present-day E. 83rd Ave.

The Goodriches were Charles and Caroline. They had five children of their own who likely attended the Vincent school: Cora, Ida, Arthur, Clarence, and Harold. (The two youngest would later go to war, and Harold would not come home.)

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*Which would be the one that ended up as the Lindborg home on Ainsworth Road, as I currently understand it all.

Ross Township Graduates

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Hobart Gazette 19 May 1922.

Judging by the names, District 2 was the W.G. Haan School. Laverne Niksch was the son of Edward and Tillie. Gilbert was the orphan boy adopted by Lee and Lena Hunter. Edwin Paine, brother of Alice, is listed in the 1920 Census as "Alfred E." and in the 1930 Census and "A. Edwin." Franklin Lindborg — well, we even have his graduation photo (wish I knew who the friend was). Gordon Argo was the son of George and Rachel "Rae" Argo.

The only one I don't really know is Andy Meyer. After poking around a bit on Ancestry.com, I think he might be the son of John and Martha Meyers, as the 1920 Census enumerator spelled it, who then lived in Hobart Township on the "East Gary Road near Cemetery" — which sounds like N. Lake Park Avenue near Crown Hill Cemetery, but I'm not sure about any of this.


As for the other districts, I'm don't know which schools they meant. Part of the problem is that I don't know which schools were still operating. The Merrillville and Vincent schools, of course, and maybe the Adams school …but who knows what else?

Mud, Mud, Mud

This photograph of mud includes Arthur Sullivan and a horse-drawn school bus.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Arthur Sullivan, born circa 1904, was the son of Thomas and Augusta Sullivan, and the grandson of Patrick and Sarah. This photo has no date. It's difficult to judge Arthur's age here — I would guess about 20, give or take a few years. In my newspaper reading, I have not yet noticed him receiving pay from the township for driving a bus, although his father had in 1919 and 1921 (and likely other years that I can't lay my hands on at the moment). Ross Township may have had at least one motorized school bus by about 1920, but horse-drawn buses were still in use through the 1920s. Inside the bus (according to this photo's present owner, who rode a horse-drawn bus throughout his first year of school), there were two benches, one along each side wall, so the riders sat facing each other.

Notes on the back of the photo suggest that this bus carried Vincent school students.

Students at the Vincent School

I have mentioned that in the spring of 1918 Evie Thompson's family moved to the vicinity of the Vincent school, and Evie became a student there. We have a photo of her with her classmates.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

On the back, someone has hinted at the identities of the children …



… failing to include a full surname, or to indicate which name belongs with which child. The only one we can recognize is Eva Thompson herself, the tall girl with glasses, second from the left in the back row.

Looking through the 1920 Census, I have come up with possible surnames for these children, based on the matching first letter and the apparent proximity of their families to the Vincent school:

Elmer Reithel, Harry Sullivan, Clarence Reithel, Theodore Henning, Delmer Henning, Donald Weiler, Eva Thompson, Mathilde Prochno, and Mabel Burkley

These are only guesses on my part, and I still don't know which name goes with which child.

The former Vincent schoolhouse still stands on the southwest corner of the intersection of Clay St. and 83rd Ave., and you can still see that pattern in the brick on its side wall.

Incidentally, I suspect that when the Gazette, in June 1912, mentioned that Gust Lindborg had "bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse" and moved it to Ainsworth to serve as his residence, the building referred to was the old frame Vincent schoolhouse. At that writing, per the 1891 Plat Book, the Sullivans had owned for some twenty years what was originally the Vincent land (per the 1874 Plat Map), and the schoolhouse had always been catercorner to that land, so I can understand why either name might be applied to the schoolhouse.

Also, this obituary of Mercy Vincent suggests that the Vincents had owned the land from circa 1844 until circa 1890, which really has nothing to do with anything, but I didn't post this before so I might as well do it now.


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Hobart Gazette 12 Jan. 1906.

W.G. Haan School Opens

If "last Tuesday" means the Tuesday before the newspaper went to press, then the first day of classes in the new W.G. Haan School was September 7, 1920.

(Also, a crime story involving our old friend William Raschka.)


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In other school news, Lillian Keilman began teaching at the Vincent school, which I believe was located at the intersection of (present-day) Clay St. and 83rd Ave.


Sources:
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 9 Sept. 1920.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 10 Sept. 1920.