Stop Dumping Your Dead Animals in the Alleys

Hobart must have been a pleasant place to live, in 1921, with dead animals in the alleys and garbage in the streets …


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Hobart News 22 Dec. 1921.

… and check forgers in the stores, but that was unusual. (The headline got cut off on the printout — in full it reads, "Check Forger Gets in His Work in Hobart Thursday and Friday.")




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Hobart News 22 Dec. 1921.

That is all.

Garbage Dumps of Ainsworth: Tanks for Nothing

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I wonder how this big tank ended up in the river bottoms in northern Deep River County Park? And when I say "big," I mean it's about 5 or 6 feet long, so it must be very heavy. And it's at least a quarter mile from any house that ever existed on that side of the river. Did somebody drag it down there? (And did they drain the propane or gasoline or whatever before they did?) Or did it float there on the river's flood tide?

I actually do spend time wondering about things like this.

Garbage Dumps of Ainsworth: The Apogee

Long ago I promised to show you the best the Ainsworth has to offer in the way of garbage dumps, and now that the vegetation has died back, the snows melted and the floods receded, I can keep my promise.

Reader, do you want cheap 1960s furniture left to rot in the weather? rusted-out household appliances? yard tools with essential parts missing? broken bottles that wouldn't have any value even if they were intact? — then Ainsworth is your place: specifically, the west bank of the Deep River just north of Ainsworth Road.

Come in, and take a chair, won't you?


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Would you like a Pepsi?



…or something stronger, perhaps?



No? All right. Here's the difficult part. We have to climb down this bank to the Deep River bottomlands. It's a bit steep.

Here we are. Not too tired, are you? Ha ha.



If you don't like that one, there's plenty more.

Oh, look at this! Why'd they throw away this perfectly good washing machine? All it needs is a little WD-40!



Not sure what that thing is. Might be a washing machine dating back to before WD-40 was invented.



Not sure what this was, either, but it sure holds a lot of junk now.



I wonder if the guy who lost this boot was married to the Size 8 lady?



This lawn mower has mowed its last lawn . . .



. . . and this wheelbarrow has barrowed its last . . . um, something.



Oh, this takes me back. In my day, you see, we didn't have all this fancy "recycling" stuff. We walked around on broken bottles all the time, and we never complained!



You young kids today, you just don't know.

Well, I may be a dinosaur, but I still have a spring in my step.



But now it's time to say goodbye to all our trashy friends.



Don't worry, they'll still be here a hundred years from now.

Leftovers

Just some random stuff in Deep River County Park, left over from the days before it was a county park.

She wore a size 8. Probably still does, if she's still living.


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This enameled pot must have been rather pretty, back in the day.



I want to be here 20 years from now to see who wins — the tree or the gate.



No idea what kind of vehicle this grill came from … but it was red.

Garbage Dumps of Ainsworth: Made in Norway and Dry Ice

Not far from the House in the Woods, you can find evidence of long-ago chemical activity.

Whatever used to be in this barrel, it was made in Norway, according to the second line stamped on the barrel. I can't read the first line — maybe it's in Norwegian?


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Who would need this much dry ice, and for what?



Per the plat books I've found so far, this land was owned by Henry Chester, then Charles Chester, then Roland and Gladys Schmitt, then Chester Wasy. I don't know which of them we can blame for leaving this mess. Now it's public land, so this mess, or these historical artifacts, belong to all of us and to posterity.

Garbage Dumps of Ainsworth: The Gruesome Remains

After I bought my house, I discovered, 'way out in a corner of my field, the partial remains of a dismembered car.


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I wonder, did they drive the car out there and then take off the axle? Then how did they get the car away from the scene of the crime? Or did they take the axle off somewhere else, and then carry it out to the field where nobody would think to look for it? — in which case, we've got two crime scenes, one here and one unknown.

CSI: Ainsworth might be able to get prints off these glass bottles.


Was this mysterious rusted thingy somehow involved?


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I've already updated my Grand Trunk Western Historical Images map with a few more scenes, plus a 1948 accident report I stumbled across. That project is useful to while away the time until the newspaper archive gets its search engine updated, and the Hobart Historical Society gets a new toner cartridge for its photocopier. I spent a couple hours there on Saturday and found a lot of detailed stories in the 1935 Hobart paper relating to the murder I'm researching. The Hobart paper is a great resource but it's not searchable. I either have to know what I'm looking for — what happened and when it happened — or just spend hours randomly reading papers on microfilm to see if I can find anything touching on Ainsworth.

Garbage Dumps of Ainsworth, Part 1

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This pile of decayed railroad ties, old tires, gravel and other debris sits on the empty strip of land between Ainsworth Road and the Grand Trunk Railroad. Its components have been there for God knows how long, but this piled-up configuration is of relatively recent origin — maybe 10 years, dating back to a time when some extensive work had to be done on the adjacent section of the track, and the railroad brought in a bulldozer and pushed all the scattered debris into a nice, neat pile to get it out of the way of the workers and their equipment.

A neighbor told me that that section of track tends to have problems because at the time Ainsworth Road was re-routed, the railroad did a slapdash job of deconstructing the old Ainsworth Road crossing. The work that resulted in this pile of garbage may have corrected the problems, if that story was correct.

With respect to garbage dumps, my dear friends, this is only a taste of things to come; but you will have to be patient, because Ainsworth's most intriguing garbage dumps are at present covered in dense summer vegetation and not easily photographed. I will cheer your winter hours with photos of the more interesting dumps if it doesn't snow too much.