Streetcar on Third at Main, 1939

Here's a scan of a negative I bought recently:


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The negative appears to date to 1939, based on the envelope it came in:



As interesting to me as the car is the background — the south side of 238 Main, with a barn-looking outbuilding that has since vanished.

Dan Kleine points out that it would be natural for someone to photograph a streetcar in February 1939, since the line was going to be shut down in March of that year. He also did some research on the names listed on the envelope, and found that John A. Rehor was a published Nickel Plate historian and photographer. W. Lupher Hay was described as a "rail photographer" by Dean K. Fick in The Lakeside and Marblehead Railway (2003), and it seems he once used a railroad car as a summer cottage — how cool is that?

The negative has been donated to the Hobart Historical Society.

Streetcar Snowplow

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When I found this photo for sale, I emailed Dan Kleine to ask if he knew anything about it, and what I got back from him was its whole biography:

When the photo was taken it was Gary Railways car, not Gary & Hobart, before that it was a Gary & Southern car.

This is car 8, bought new by the Gary & Southern, 45th to Lottaville, in 1912. Cars 6 & 8 were converted to snow plows for Gary Railways in 1929; car 8 was renumbered P4. Before 1929 the individual lines had merged and were know just as Gary Railways, although the car may have been used on the Hobart tracks. P4 was scrapped in 1939. Car 6, renumbered P3, had the plow at the opposite end of the car and was scrapped in 1941.

Railroads would take old cars and convert them for maintenance service in their own shop, so many of them were one-of-a-kind. They often looked strange and jerry-rigged; that's why photographers and modelers like them.

This is probably a rare photo, there are very few Gary & Southern photos. It has a Merrillville connection. Gary & Southern had 4 cars, 2 coaches numbered 2 & 4, and 2 combines numbered 6 & 8 (a combine has baggage door & compartment). Coach 2 ended up as the KAY-BEE-EATER (photo upstairs in the [Merrillville History] Museum). These cars had steel frames with wooden bodies made by Niles in Cleveland.

So this car ran on the line that eventually connected Gary and Crown Point, and this photo must date between 1929 and 1939.

Gary & Southern Fatalities

The Gary & Southern streetcar line, running to Crown Point, crossed the old Lincoln Highway at what is now Taft Street, so that intersection is probably the location "west of Merrillville" where a fatal accident occurred on September 2, 1922:


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Hobart Gazette 8 Sept. 1922.

Below that article, we find Floyd Demmon setting up his law office in Hobart. He had married Alice Mundell (the Honey Man's sister) in 1918 (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index).

It's a Rich Man's Road and a Poor Man's Tax

These notices to Ross Township taxpayers appeared in April 1922:


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Hobart Gazette 14 Apr. 1922.

In view of recent complaints about the condition of local roads, some road improvements would seem necessary and desirable, even if interest-bearing bonds had to be issued to pay for them.

But by late May the protests of some unnamed "Ross Township farmers" had brought a member of the state board of tax commissioners up to from Indianapolis to look into the proposed work. The general objection was that the costs of construction were inflated. With regard to the Woods road, protesters were suspicious of the fact that the wealthy Gary citizens who used the Gary Country Club (at the site of the present-day Innsbrook Country Club) would benefit from the road while not bearing any of its cost.


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Hobart News 1 June 1922.

Perhaps the awarding of the road-work contract to someone who wasn't local didn't sit well with them either.

I gather from the description in this article that the "Sam B. Woods road" to be improved was only five-eighths of a mile long. My guess at its location is marked in red on this excerpt from the 1926 Plat Book:


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The "Goodrich road" improvement area was 2.5 miles "running south and west from Ainsworth on the Lincoln highway" … so, some unspecified chunk of the Lincoln Highway between Ainsworth and Merrillville?


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Hey, I just like making these little maps.

The Streetcar Benches Didn't Make Themselves, You Know

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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Fred Ols.

All of these men, assembled for a photo in front of a Gary-Hobart line streetcar, are unidentified save for the man in the white shirt and suspenders, second from the right. He is Henry Ols. He was employed as a carpenter for the streetcar line. He made benches for the streetcars.

The date is unknown, but estimated at around 1914-15.

Streetcar Pictures

A recent purchase. This first one, according to handwritten notes on the back, is Gary Railways Car #5, formerly of the Gary-Hobart Railway, now* used on the Gary-Hobart run.


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We have no date and no location for this photo, but from the buildings in the background I would venture to guess it was taken in Gary. It's bound for Hobart, as you can see by the sign in the window.


The second is of lesser quality, apparently a photograph of a printed photograph. Per the handwritten notes with it, it's a former Gary & Hobart Traction Co. car, now* owned by Gary Railways. I don't have a source for the original, nor a date, and I won't even guess the location.



____________________________
*"Now" being relative to the writing of the notes, of course, not this post.

Cow v. Streetcar

It ended badly for the cow.


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Hobart Gazette 19 Aug. 1921.

Car #19

A local railroad historian has shared with me some photographs he took of Gary Railways Car #19 at the Illinois Railway Museum:



This is one of the cars that operated on the Gary-Hobart line. Some of its parts of missing, but it still has its original paint.

Our New President and Vice President

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From the Hobart News of Nov. 4, 1920.

The obituary of the streetcar-line owner suggests that Hobartites were less than happy with the line's service.

More bad news from the same issue's summary of "Town Board Doings": "A report by the state board of health showed the town water polluted and unfit for domestic use."

A couple more cheerful items, one from the "Local and Personal" column: "Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Raschka, Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Chester and Mrs. Lovisa Nelson motored to Fort Wayne Saturday and visited at the home of Mrs. Olson, returning Monday."

This is the other:



Sweaters from Ainsworth! … OK, it's not as exciting as a trip to Purdue or a camera, but it's better than a roll of roofing paper or a manure fork.

A New End of the Line

In June 1920, the Hobart town board gave permission to the Gary and Hobart Traction Company to stop its streetcars at Main and Third Streets — a new eastern end of the streetcar line that had formerly gone all the way to the Pennsy depot. The same month, the company began to remove its track from Third St. and Union St. — which I believe is what S. Illinois St. was then called.

♦    ♦    ♦
Meanwhile, Lee & Rhodes had plans for June 26: to host a demonstration of an electric washing machine; here you can see the 1919 A.B.C. model.



I do not know what "risbans" might be, unless that is a corruption of "wristbands," i.e., cuffs on shirts, etc., which do tend to get soiled and are hard to clean.


Sources:
♦ Advertisement. Hobart Gazette 25 June 1920.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 25 June 1920.
♦ "St. Car Company Granted Right to Stop at Main St." Hobart News 3 June 1920.

Hobart-Gary Streetcar Stops, Oct. 1918

From the Hobart News of Oct. 3, 1918.


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I would be confused by that "E., J. & E. Railway Crossing" if I didn't know that the "J" then had a spur track that crossed Third Street, although its main line did not. (See map here.)

Hobart Then and Now: Streetcar Barn

Circa 1918 and 2011.



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Top image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Streetcar barn on Third Street, on the west side of the Deep River. Sorry about the poor quality of the old photo, but that's all I could get.

You can just make out a streetcar inside the left bay. (I don't know what that is in the right bay.) So I guess this is where the streetcars were stored when they weren't running.

I'm told that during the 1930s, robbers would sometimes lie in wait at the barn and rob the conductor when he brought the car in after the last run of the night. They were called the "car barn bandits."

1939 Aerial Photos of Hobart: Streetcar Line

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Image courtesy of the Indiana Geological Survey, I.U. Bloomington.

Well, this is embarrassing. I just realized that if I'd been paying attention when I looked at the 1939 Plat Book, and if it had registered in my brain that "Gary-Hobart Interurban R.R." refers to the streetcar line, I wouldn't have had to schlep my aerial prints over to an old-timer's house to ask if this photo really does show the streetcar line, because according to the plat book, it does. (However, it was a pleasant visit, as always, so I'm not complaining … just embarrassed.)


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This image from the 1939 Plat Book shows the streetcar line, aka the Gary-Hobart Interurban R.R., running through Hobart. By this time its Hobart terminus was at the northwest corner of Third and Main. From there it ran along the north side of Third Street until it crossed the bridge; then it ran down the center of Third Street. Around Ash Street it moved away from Third Street to cross Connecticut and Pennsylvania diagonally. At First Street (now West Cleveland Ave.) it joined up with Washington and ran down the center of that street up to the Pennsy R.R. There it made a turn and ran along the south side of the railroad tracks until they crossed 37th Avenue, at which point the streetcar line turned west to run along the north side of 37th Avenue straight to Broadway in Gary, where it probably met up with the Gary streetcars, which (I am told) ran up and down Broadway.

If you go to Google maps or Mapquest for a present-day satellite image, it looks to me as if that paved alley moving diagonally northwest from Ash Street is a vestige of the streetcar line, as far as it's diagonal — it soon turns straight north and leaves the path of the streetcar. And maybe I'm seeing things, but there seems to be a slight imprint of the streetcar line left in people's yards on either side of Connecticut, mid-way between Second and Third Streets.


Here's that aerial photo decorated with colored labels. You know how I love doing that. Also a few guesses at what's what.


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I've got 6 or 7 more aerial photos that I'll get up here eventually, but this is the most interesting one.

Streetcar Motorman and Conductor

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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

At left, Fred Winans, motorman; at right, Charles Frame, conductor.

No specific date, but here's what the notes on the back say: "Hobart-Gary streetcar line. Taken prior to 1925 — new one-man cars numbers 4 & 5 replaced two-man cars in Hobart service from Gary."

Streetcars, Undated

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Images in this post courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Here we have Post-Apocalypse Streetcar. Seriously, doesn't the whole place look desolate? No people, no cars, just scraggly weeds growing everywhere.

No helpful notes on the back to give us a date, and I know only enough to date it between 1917 (when the Strattan building lost its curtain loft) and 1940 (when the Hobart House was demolished).

Let's move on to a more cheerful picture.



… That's better. This undated image shows the same corner as my 1938 slide, but judging by the automobiles on the street, I'd estimate it at about ten years later. By that time, this corner was the end of the line for the streetcars; i.e., they no longer traveled all the way to the Pennsy depot.

Streetcars, 1911 and 1912

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All images in this post courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

From notes on the reverse of this postcard we know that this photo was taken in Gary on May 4, 1911, and that two of the men are Louis Maybaum and Grover Linton (presumably the two standing in front, but the notes don't specify which is which). It would have to be Gary, since streetcars were not running in Hobart in 1911.


The image below comes from a postcard dated March 4, 1912.



The reverse is rather interesting.



It's addressed to Mrs. Gilbert Bullock, who apparently is vacationing in Florida. I suppose that's our Estelle, though I haven't checked the census records to see if it might not be some niece-in-law of hers.

Her Hobart correspondent writes (I will insert some punctuation for her):

Dear Mrs. Bullock, Should Have written to you before. We are still Haveing Winter. Glad you are feeling better. Both of you. All aboard for Gary. Here is the car but the trouble is there is nothing to run it on. We missed you at auxillary last week. Best regards, Mrs. Banks.

Streetcar at Third and Main

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Slide bought on eBay. This is from 1938, according to a caption on a reproduction of this image at the Hobart Historical Society.

I didn't know you couldn't just slap a slide onto your scanner and scan it, until I tried it and got a very disappointing result. So I had to look it up, and found that if I didn't want to shell out big bucks for a Transparent Media Adapter, I could do what this guy says and make a 3-D triangle from bright white paper. So I did. You see the result above. I don't know if a Transparent Media Adapter would do any better.