The Old John and Sophie Harms Place, in Need of Landscaping

Since I can't go to libraries to research more complex topics, I think I'll just drag out some random pictures that I haven't gotten around to posting before.

To start off: Eldon and Norma Harms' new home on Cleveland Avenue as it looked in the summer of 1957, just after they bought it from Eldon's Aunt Sophie.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.



I like these photos because this is how my property is going to look when somebody finally buys it from me or my estate — that is, overgrown and in need of attention. When Sophie (Schavey) Harms sold the property, she was about 76 years old and had been widowed for over a decade. The upkeep of the old place was too much for her. Eldon and Norma had a lot of work to do to tame the wilderness.

The outbuildings were in the same condition. Here is the barn …



… and the granary:




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[5/13/2020 update] Thanks to Aaron (in the comments to this post), we now have some fairly recent Google street view screenshots of the old house.

August 2008:

(Click on images to enlarge)

October 2008:


July 2009, showing the mound of bare earth where the house has been demolished:


That mound of earth is grown over with grass now. Eldon pointed it out to me, one day when we were driving past there, as the approximate site of the house.

He said that trying to wallpaper in that house was a frustrating experience, since none of the corners were square — perhaps because they never had been square, or perhaps the structure had settled unevenly.

Haying with Horses

These photos were taken in the summer of 1937 on the old Harms homestead. In the first one, we are near the barn on the south side of the road.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Here are my notes based on what Eldon Harms told me about the photo:

The team is pulling a hay wagon. Note the ladder on the wagon: as the hay piled up on the wagon, you climbed the ladder to drive the team so that you weren't buried in the hay. The building in the background is the corn crib, which held the dried ears of corn on the cob that would eventually be taken to the mill in town (Hobart) and ground up for cattle feed.

The horses are Nel and Topsy. Eldon is at left. The two girls are probably his sisters. His father, Herman, is holding the reins.

In this photo, we are out in the hay field:



My notes based on what Eldon told me about it:

At left you can see the hay loader, which picked up the hay from the field and deposited it on top of the wagon.

When you cut the hay, you raked it into long windrows lying on the field. Then you hitched your double team to the hay wagon and drove them over each windrow — one horse on each side of the windrow — and the hay loader, attached to the rear of the wagon, ran along picking up the hay and dropping it onto the wagon.

In this picture Bud Ensign (at right) is driving the team, and Herman Harms, Sr., is raking the hay to distribute the load evenly over the wagon. The wheels of the wagon are just barely visible under the hay hanging down, and at the lower right of the photo you can see the horses' legs.

Bud Ensign's father had died, so Bud wanted to earn extra money to help his family; that is why he hired on with the Harmses. He was only 14 at this time.

The hay wagon could be converted into a box wagon, by removing the back section and attaching a box. That was more convenient for driving when you weren't carrying a load of hay.

We've already discussed how you got the hay from the wagon to the loft of the barn.

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I'm not sure if I ever asked Eldon who exactly "Bud" Ensign was; if he told me, I've forgotten.

Looking into the census records for a local Ensign boy who would have been about 14 in 1937, I find Richard Elden Ensign. We've seen Richard before, but I had his nickname down as "Dick." Perhaps a 14-year-old Bud might, within a few years, be able to make people call him a slightly more formal name.

Richard's father, John Ensign, had died in October 1935 (Indiana Death Certificates), leaving a widow, Goldie, with some half-a-dozen children, the youngest of which was about three years old.[1] And this was in the midst of the Great Depression.

Incidentally, John's mother had been Elizabeth aka Nora (Shearer) Ensign.


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[1] The 1930 Census and 1940 Census are not consistent regarding some of the children's ages.

Merry Christmas!

Here's Santa Claus in 1962:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

OK, actually, that's Minnie Rossow Harms, impersonating Santa to bring presents to her grandchildren.

I believe the profile at the extreme left belongs to Eldon Harms. The woman at the back with a child in her arms is Norma (Chase), Eldon's wife. The others I can't identify.

High Water!

Since we've been dealing with flooding in past few days, it seems an appropriate time to post these photos, taken by Eldon Harms, of flooding in October 1954 (according to handwritten notes on the originals).

The first shows the bridge on 37th Avenue west of State Road 51, nearly swamped.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.



The second shows State Road 51 north of 37th Avenue, well and truly swamped.




Here's the tumble dam, tumbling like crazy.




Here's the water treatment plant, getting the water treatment.




And finally, this is the rear of 200 N. Main — then a NIPSCO office, now the Villa del Sol restaurant.



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Here is my own contribution, taken yesterday in Deep River County Park. The park's Facebook page had noted that the hiking trails were impassable, and truly it spoke — at least concerning the trails at the level of the river. This is the trail that passes under the Canadian National Railroad bridge. At the center of the photo you can see the handrail poking up from the rushing waters of the Deep River.



Higher trails were flooded only in spots.

Merry Christmas!

A note on this picture tells us it was taken on Christmas Day 1953.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.


One of those ladies is Grandma Chase — mother of Norma Chase Harms. The other is identified only as Helen. No doubt they are fixing Christmas dinner for the family.

So-o-o-o Big!

Today would have been Eldon Harms' 93rd birthday.

This photo shows him at the age of two.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

His siblings had taught him to hold out his arms like that and say, "So-o-o-o big!" — a trick they probably learned from Edna Ferber's novel, which had been published the year Eldon was born.

Another photo, stored in a different album but taken the same day, I think, shows little Eldon doing his So Big trick again.



No one else in the photo is identified.

The Old Fire Truck Again

I have a couple more photos of the old Camp 133/V.F.W. fire truck, last seen on July 4, 1947.

This one was taken in August of 1957, during Eldon and Norma Harms' housewarming party on the old Fox-Harms place.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

At left you can see the fire truck's steering wheel, and the worn upholstery of driver's seat. As to who Bob, Jane and Buck were, your guess is as good as mine. From the looks of it, that housewarming party was a whole lot of fun.


In this photo, the fire truck is a little girl's playground.

The Harms Barn

The mention in my last post of the Harms barn reminded me that I have a couple of photos of it.*

This first photo is undated.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

The barn stood across Ainsworth Road from the Harms farmhouse — in other words, on the south side of the road.

Hay was stored in the loft of this barn. Eldon Harms explained to me the laborious process by which hay, brought in from the fields on a wagon, was carried up to the loft:

You slid open those big doors at the center and drove your horses and wagon straight in. Once it was all inside, you unhitched your horses and brought them out through the small doors at right. Then you hitched them to a rope that ran up to a mechanism inside the top of the barn. The mechanism inside included a "fork" that moved up and down, and laterally along a track attached to the top beam of the barn. One person worked with that fork mechanism inside, while another handled the team outside. The inside person let the fork down into the load of hay on the wagon, then signaled to the person outside.

The outside person drove the horses forward toward the road (away from the barn). Their power lifted the "fork," now full of hay, upward. When it reached the top, a tripping mechanism caused it to move laterally, over the floor of the hayloft (still powered by the horses moving forward). When it reached the right spot, the inside person would make the fork stop and release its load of hay.

Then the horses had to retrace their steps backward, to bring the fork back across the loft and down to the wagon, where it would pick up another load of hay. Repeat until all of the hay had been transferred from the wagon to the hayloft.

Here's the second photo of the barn:



"The Old Red Barn in 1937," reads the handwritten caption. Not much is different from the first photo except that the big side doors have been replaced or resurfaced. I think this photo is later than the first one (just on general appearances); it couldn't be earlier (not much earlier anyway), since the Harmses left the farm in 1938.

I also scanned the 1937 photo directly from the negative.




No trace of the old barn remains.

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*I don't know for certain that this is the barn damaged in the window storm in 1922, but the barn in these photos was on the Harms farm.

NIPSCO Truck on a Snowy Day, 1963

Here is NIPSCO's 1957 International Crew Truck #4083-2, ready to go to work on gas lines.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

The truck for electrical work would be different.

It is pulling a compressor (#1031-2).



These photos were taken at the NIPSCO facility on the west side of S.R. 130, just south of Cleveland Avenue (±200 S. Hobart Road, where the school buses are kept now). In the background is the garage for service trucks.





The photos were developed in April of 1963, but I suspect they were taken before April. Then again, the weather does strange things sometimes.

That's For Us to Know and You to Find Out

In honor of Halloween, here's a couple of boys dressed up as a donkey, on the grounds of the Ainsworth school:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

They weren't dressing that way for Halloween — it was their costume for a performance by the W.G. Haan students of an operetta, Seeing Nellie Home, in May 1937.*

The two boys were Eldon Harms and Lorin Butt Delmer "John" Foreman.** Which is which in the photo I cannot say, and back in May 1937, whenever anyone would ask them who played the front and who the rear of the donkey, they'd say, "That's for us to know and you to find out."

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*This seems to be the gist of the notes on the back, but I haven't been able to locate any such operetta. "Seeing Nellie Home" may have been a featured song rather than the name of the operetta.
**[11/4/2014 update] Whoever wrote the notes on the back of the photo was wrong, or so Eldon Harms has told me: it was Delmer "John" Foreman under that donkey suit with him, not Lorin Butt. And they took turns playing the front and the back of the donkey.

The Water Tower from the Ground

The water-tower views reminded me that I have a photo of the water tower taken from the ground. Or near the ground.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of E. Harms.

The year was 1947, and even NIPSCO* had caught centennial fever: here we see Eldon Harms, an employee, painting the window frames of the NIPSCO building to make it look nice for the big celebration in July. In the background is the water tower, and you can see a catwalk around it, which was probably where yesterday's water-tower views were shot from.

The water tower is gone now. So is the building Eldon was painting. Only the brick building between them still stands at the east end of Jerry Pavese Park.


Another view of the NIPSCO building and the same employee up the ladder:



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*I use the name "NIPSCO" loosely. This utility operation may or may not have gone by that name in 1947; eventually it did.

Fox and Harms

John Harms grew up on the Harms homestead east of Ainsworth. In 1901, at the age of 24, he married Sophia Schavey. By 1910, it appears he had moved his wife and young son, Lester, to Valparaiso, while he worked as a railroad baggageman. (I say "it appears" because we have to allow for a couple of errors on the census-taker's part to conclude that this little family is the one we want.) But in August 1919 he bought the land that would become his lifelong home.


(Click on images to enlarge)

Both newspaper accounts agree that the parcel was 40 acres, so I don't know how to account for the fact that it looks smaller than that in the 1926 plat book.



The 1891 plat book shows the parcel as being about 35 acres. Even then it was owned by the Foxes (John and his wife, Anna), but I have not been able to find them in the census earlier than 1900, when John was 50 years old, Anna 44, and they farmed that land with the help of their 20-year-old son, William.

The spring mentioned in the article was the only source of water for the house when John and Sophia Harms bought it. There was no running water in the house — you had to carry it up from the springhouse. Nor was there an indoor bathroom, or a septic tank. The Harmses remodeled the house to include those modern conveniences.

I am told (by the same person who told me the above) that the Fox-Harms house, which stood at 1722 East Cleveland Avenue, was demolished just a few years ago.

I have a couple photos of bits of the Fox-Harms house, accidentally taken while someone was photographing his beloved cars. The first is undated, but must be from 1957 or later. The second is from 1964.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images from a private collection.




Sources:
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "John Harms Buys John Fox Forty Acres Just East of Town." Hobart News 14 Aug. 1919.
♦ Untitled social column. Hobart Gazette 22 Aug. 1919.