Unidentified Pugnacious Teenager

Another entry into our growing collection of teenagers who managed to get through the eighth grade, or through catechism classes, but didn't appreciate having to get photographed for the occasion.

This one looks as if she intends to hurt somebody once this is all over.


(Click on image to enlarge)

Since the photo was taken at Showman's Gallery, we can date it somewhere between about 1893 and 1898.

She is standing in front of the same painted backdrop as the teenage zombie linked above. I wonder if they were in the same class? How often did Showman refresh his painted backdrops?

Dogs in Cemeteries

Today we have two tales of dogs in cemeteries.

The first comes from the "Local Drifts" column of the Hobart Gazette of February 22, 1924:

An incident of "dog faithfulness" is told of the pet dog of the late Wm. Kruse, who was buried Feb. 3 in the Hobart cemetery. The dog remains almost constantly upon the grave, departing only when forced to go to his master's late home for something to eat.

I previously wrote about William Kruse's death. I suppose it was the kind housekeeper, Emma Dunn, who was feeding the dog.

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The second dog in a cemetery came to my attention through a Facebook post by Michael White about one of his recent visits to some historical places in northwest Indiana. The post included some photos taken in Adams Cemetery, in Morgan Township, Porter County.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Michael White.

As a dog person, I was charmed by this little cast-stone canine, but also mystified: surely there could not be a dog buried in a human cemetery?

The dog statuette is near the grave of John B. Covert.



That does not necessarily mean it has anything to do with Mr. Covert, or even that the statuette is now in the spot where it was originally placed.[1]

I went looking online for anything that could explain the presence of the dog. The only thing I could find involving both the Covert name and a dog is this story from the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger of September 6, 1949:


(Click on image to enlarge)

But, again, this canine WWII veteran could not be buried in the Adams Cemetery. Wilford Covert is not buried there, either; his grave is in Portland, Oregon.

Wilford and John Covert were cousins of some degree — Jeremiah Covert (1829-1906) was John's grandfather and Wilford's great-grandfather, if I'm reading the family trees on Ancestry.com correctly.

Maybe the Coverts in general were dog lovers. Maybe the statuette was indeed intended for John, to honor a beloved dog he had lost or left behind. Or maybe the statuette has wandered from its original placement and has nothing to do with the Coverts.

"Maybe" all kinds of things, right? I could sit here all day and think of possible explanations, and still not be close to the truth. I hope it has not been lost to time. I hope someone out there knows the story of this little sleeping dog.

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[1] Recall my then-and-now post of the Chester Cemetery where in one case I could not produce a definite "now" because the arrangement of the old stones had seemingly changed so much since 1963.

Easter Greetings

(Click on images to enlarge)

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.

Darn Lucky Kids of Ainsworth

This photo was (somewhat crudely) printed on a postcard …


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… and mailed on April 29, 1909, from Ainsworth to the 13-year-old Phillip Waldeck in Deepriver (by someone who didn't know how to spell Phillip):



These lucky kids are unidentified. I think their parents memorialized this awesome playhouse by taking the photo and having it printed on at least one postcard. So many nice things! — kid-sized rocking chairs, two dolls, a teddy bear loading up a toy train, and curtains in the window.

What do you want to bet these kids were some of Philly's many Maybaum cousins? I'm just taking a wild guess.

"Cow in Lake," 1908

Here's a random pointless postcard I bought that doesn't tell us anything helpful about Hobart, but I'm too tired to do anything serious today.


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I'm sure it looked all verdant and serene when August Haase photographed it. Hate to think about the mosquito larvae wriggling around in that water.

The postmark is 1908.



"Cow in lake," someone has helpfully written on the back. This is "down on the river," according to the writer, so maybe somewhere along the Deep River?

I think the writer is Lillian Maud Collins and the addressee her future husband, Joseph Archibald Teegarden. They were married in 1911. Awww, isn't that sweet? but nothing to do with Hobart.

"Going to the (Something) With It"

This is the last entry in the Jeremiah Wiggins estate papers, and I can't read it.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.

Here is my pathetic attempt at a transcription:

_______ [Wigens?] __________ _________ _________ _________ _______ _____ going to the _________ with it    $2.00

July 1839                _________ _______

I tried a few free AI enhancing programs, which didn't produce anything more legible.

My only remaining hope is that someday its meaning will be revealed to me in a dream.

The Lost Cemetery of Ainsworth Road

This post is based on research by local historian Michael White, who first pieced together the bits of information from various sources that pointed to an unaccounted-for old cemetery in Ross Township along with its general location. He was kind enough to clue me in.


The Rev. T.H. Ball, our legendary Lake County historian, in 1872[1] compiled a list of all the cemeteries he knew of in each township in the county. In the list for Ross Township, he included six cemeteries, five of which clearly correspond to ones we can identify today and can find in the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society's Ross Township Cemeteries. But one item in Ball's list is a puzzler:

An old burial place near the Wilkinson Ford of Deep River, from which some bodies have been removed, but where many yet remain. This old spot is now part of a cultivated field. It seems a pity that the little ground required to receive the dust of human forms may not remain undisturbed. This spot ought yet to be rescued from the plowshire [sic], consecrated, as it has been, by the burial of old settlers; or the human remains there resting should be removed to a quiet cemetery which is sacred to repose.

Elsewhere in the same book, in listing early settlers of Lake County in the 1830s, Ball says: "The third family arriving was that of Robert Wilkinson, who settled on Deep River, where the only ford known in early times was situated."[2] (I have previously discussed my reasons for thinking that Ainsworth Road was part of the old Sauk Trail, predating white settlement. The indigenous people may have established the trail because there was a natural ford in the Deep River where Ainsworth Road crosses it — a natural ford that the white settlers would then have used as they trickled in along the trail during the 1830s.)

In another of his books, Ball tells us that in the 1830s a bridge "across Deep River at B. Wilkinson's crossing near the Porter county line [was] built by Amsi L. Ball, cost[ing] four hundred dollars."[3] So far we've heard only of Robert Wilkinson; who was B. Wilkinson? To find that out we have to turn to the "History of Lake County, 1833 – 1847" by Solon Robinson, as printed in 1929:[4]

The first family that came after Childers and myself [Solon Robinson] was that of Robert Wilkinson, (at the place where his brother Benijah now lives on Deep River; at that time, the only known crossing place.) He settled about the last of November, 1834. … Wilkinson lived a few years where he settled, when he moved off and his brother took his place.

So "B." stands for Benijah — or, as it is sometimes written, Benajah — and he succeeded his brother Robert on the settlement near the ford of the Deep River.[5]

Robinson's account includes, among a list of bridges built in 1837, a bridge "across Deep River at Benajah Wilkinson's [built] by A. L. Ball, for $400, besides several smaller ones, by means of the 3 per cent fund."[6]

Goodspeed and Blanchard's 1882 county history also mentions this $400 bridge built by A.L. Ball, and specifies that it was in "Section 16, Township 35, Range 7."[7]

Here is that section as it appears on the 1874 plat map:[8]


(Click on image to enlarge)

The only road that crossed the Deep River in Section 16 was Ainsworth Road, aka the old Sauk Trail.

Incidentally, Goodspeed and Blanchard tell us that in 1837 three township trustees were appointed for Twp. 35, Range 7 (Ross Township): John Wood, whom everybody knows; Robert Wilkinson; and William Hodson (whose orphaned sons I believe we've already met).[9] So Robert Wilkinson was still in Ross Township some three years after settling there.

The only early land purchase record I could find pertaining to the Wilkinson brothers and Section 16 shows Benajah buying 38 acres described as "Part Lot No. 5" on July 27, 1840.[10] That may have been the year Robert moved on.

Benajah appears in the 1840 census for the Ross Township area of Lake County;[11] his brother does not.


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Image from Ancestry.com.

In August of 1849, Benajah Wilkinson died.


(Click on image to enlarge — a bit; sorry about the quality)
Image from Indiana State Library Digital Collections, U.S. Census Mortality Schedule for Indiana, 1850, Counties L-Z.

There is now no record of where he was buried. I am willing to bet that it was in the lost Wilkinson cemetery.

The 1850 census shows his widow, Prudence, and her children still in Ross Township.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from Ancestry.com. Evidently the family was in Michigan in 1836 when their daughter, Electa, was born. The first of their children to be a native Hoosier was born in 1839.

Sometime after that they left Indiana.[12] Prudence died in 1885 in Minnesota.

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So where, exactly, is the lost cemetery? It was somewhere along Ainsworth Road, near the Deep River — but how near? which side of the road? which side of the river? I'm thinking that it would probably be on the west side of the river, because on the east side there is a long stretch of river bottom that often floods — but further east the land rises again, and we're back to not knowing how T.H. Ball measured his "near the Wilkinson Ford of Deep River."

It's just possible that his lament about plowing over consecrated ground might have spurred action. I have done a little searching in the on-line newspapers from 1873 onward for any story about relocating the remaining bodies from the Wilkinson cemetery, but I have found nothing.

Some of the land where the cemetery could possibly be now belongs to the Lake County Parks Department. In the years that I have lived here, I have spent many hours walking my dogs all over that land without ever seeing any evidence whatsoever of a cemetery — and, believe me, I am always on the lookout for interesting artifacts in the underbrush.

I suppose this will have to be one of the mysteries of Ainsworth.

_______________
[1] T.H. Ball, Lake County, Indiana, from 1834 to 1872 (Chicago: J.W. Goodspeed, 1873). The Ross Township burial places are listed at pp. 139-140.
[2] Ibid., p. 26.
[3] T.H. Ball, Encyclopedia of Genealogy and Biography of Lake County, Indiana, with a Compendium of History 1834 – 1904 (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1904) (hereinafter, "Lake County Encyclopedia"), p. 10.
[4] Lake County Historical Association (John O. Bowers, Arthur G. Taylor, and Sam B. Woods, eds.), History of Lake County, Vol. 10 (Gary, Ind.: Calumet Press, 1929) (hereinafter, "Lake County, Vol. 10"). Solon Robinson's "Lake County, 1833 – 1847" starts on p. 35.
[5] Research on Robert Wilkinson is complicated by the fact that there were two early settlers by that name; in Ball's discussion in Lake County Encyclopedia at pp. 2-3 he mentions both, apparently distinguishing them. The one we're concerned with settled on Deep River for a short time, then gave his farm over to his brother and disappeared from history; the other settled in West Creek Township, and since he was more prominent in society and politics, more is written about him.
[6] Lake County, Vol. 10, p. 48.
[7] Weston A. Goodspeed and Charles Blanchard (eds.), Counties of Porter and Lake Indiana. Historical and Biographical. Illustrated (Chicago: F.A. Battey & Co., 1882), p. 422.
[8] Hardesty's Sectional Map of Lake Co. Indiana (Chicago: Rufus Blanchard, n.d. (the map's date is estimated at circa 1874)).
[9] Goodspeed and Blanchard at p. 421.
[10] Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society, Early Land Sales and Purchases, Lake County, Indiana, 1837 – 1857 (Valparaiso: Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society, 2006), p. 41.
[11] Yes, his name is written as "Benjamin," and no, the census does not specify the township, but among his neighbors are John Wood and some of the people who appeared in the NWIGS' listing of 1840s land purchases for Section 16, Twp. 35 N, Range 7 W.
[12] On Ancestry.com, I have found some records of Prudence Wilkinson buying land in Minnesota in 1860, but I cannot find the family in the 1860 census.

"A Very Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year"

A greeting card from one friend to another in Hobart, sometime around (I'm guessing) 1944.


(Click on images to enlarge)



If we unfold the card, we find that Margaret wrote her friend a longer message:



The recipient was Lowell Eugene Enslen.



No stamp, no helpful postmark (it may have been hand-delivered or sent inside a package). It appears that Lowell and his family lived in Gary through the 1940 Census, and I haven't been able to place him in Hobart except from 1943 (when he appears in the Hobart High School Aurora yearbook), through 1947 (per his draft registration card dated February 3, 1947; also the Enslens are listed in Hobart in my 1947 directory). He graduated from Hobart High School in 1945, where he was voted the most humorous boy:



By 1950 he was living in Valparaiso, attending the university there.

Who was Margaret? She never included her last name, and the envelope had no return address. My best guess is Margaret "Maggie" Pearson, who signed Lowell's 1945 Aurora yearbook:



I think the handwriting looks similar.

Concerning Lowell Enslen's life and careers, you can find information and photos at his entry on findagrave.com.

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I don't know much about greeting card styles. From the looks of this one, I would have guessed anywhere from the 1930s through the 1950s. I'm posting this scan of the back of the card in case anyone can find out anything from the little characters in the lower right-hand corner. I already tried and failed.

Daddy's First Church, and Daddy's Subsequent Career

After my recent post about the Deep River church history, I decided to dig out a postcard that I have been ignoring ever since I bought it a couple years ago because dealing with it would require research, and I'm lazy.

Here it is:


(Click on image to enlarge)



I thought it would take a long time to identify pastors of the Deep River church, especially a neophyte who served there circa 1918 as his first church. I was wrong.

Just a little bit of searching in the on-line newspapers turned up a Deep River pastor who apparently started at that church around May 1916 (at least, that was the first mention of him I could find):


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 17 May 1916.

And that was not a one-time appearance. The local social columns in the Porter County Vidette continued throughout 1916 and into the spring of 1917 to report the Rev. Gerald Smith preaching at the Deep River church and being entertained at local homes.[1]

In this March 1917 account of a church-related box social, we learn that the Rev. Smith's mother lived in Viroqua, Wisconsin:


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 14 Mar. 1917.

In mid-May of 1917, the Rev. Smith gave notice that he was resigning as pastor of the Deep River church …


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 16 May 1917.

… but he continued to act in that capacity for a few more weeks, at least:


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 13 June 1917.


So I, in my innocence, typed "Gerald L.K. Smith" into my Google search and … oh, dear. How is it that I never heard of him before?

A brief biography appears on Wikipedia. An Indiana website mentions Deep River among his earliest preaching experiences; apparently it was, in fact, "Daddy's first church." He has written books and had books written about him, some still available to buy on Amazon.com.

He died in 1976. Here is one of many obituaries that were printed in newspapers across the U.S.:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Miami Herald, 17 Apr. 1976.
(The year of his marriage it wrong: it was actually 1922.)

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Photographs of Gerald L.K. Smith abound on the internet, mostly from later in his career. The earliest I could find was this, from 1926, when he served as pastor of an Indianapolis church:


Image from the Indiana Album, Joan Hostetler Collection.

Here is a later photo (undated).


Image from https://www.4029tv.com/article/arkansas-presidential-candidates/43698269.

Let us go back to the postcard above and take a better look at the young man standing at the left end of the back row:


(Click on image to enlarge)

Is that the same person as in the two photos above? I don't know. I have run these photos through three free on-line facial comparison programs; two said these photos are all the same person, a third said they are not.

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And now let's look at the notes on the back of the postcard.

"Daddy's first church" was written during the ballpoint-pen era — that is, after World War II. The handwriting looks, to me, like a woman's.

The notes in red pencil may be the Rev. Smith's own writing, but I have failed to locate an on-line specimen to compare. I think these notes were written some time after the photo was taken. I imagine that Gerald Smith and his wife, Elna, were going through some of his old things and making notes for the benefit of posterity.[2] Thus, Gerald Sr.'s memory might have been a little off about the year.[3]

I had heard, of course, about the Moody Bible Institute and Moody Church of Chicago; what I did not know of, prior to researching this postcard, was the Moody connection to Cedar Lake, Indiana. In the timeframe of this postcard, one or both of those institutions held classes and events at Cedar Lake, eventually purchasing the former Monon Park for that purpose.

Here is a sampling of local articles about Moody events at Cedar Lake from 1916 to 1919:


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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 24 Jan. 1916.


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"Lowell," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 28 June 1917.



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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 27 June 1919.


The point of this Cedar-Lake discursion is that I suspect our postcard photo was taken at a Moody event there. The group in the photo is standing in wooded grounds, and the autos behind them suggest they drove there (as opposed to taking a train, as they might have for a Chicago event). While I have failed to turn up, in the on-line newspapers, any specific mention of Deep River church members attending such an event with the Rev. Gerald Smith, they may have done it without publicity.

That would have been a bit unusual, though, wouldn't it? I think the Rev. Smith himself was responsible for so many items about the Deep River Church making their way into the local papers — after he left, the church seems to have dropped from the columns of the on-line papers to such an extent that I can't even find out who succeeded him as pastor there.


But at this point my laziness kicks in again. I'm pretty sure I have identified who "Daddy" was, and I've come up with a plausible hypothesis about the photo on the postcard. Anyone who wants more research done can do it themselves.

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[1] For example, the "Driftwood from Deepriver" columns of 24 May 1916, 21 June 1916, 12 July 1916, 16 Aug. 1916; and the "Southeast Ross" columns of 8 Nov. 1916, 22 Nov. 1916, 17 Jan. 1917, 11 Apr. 1917.
[2] They had one child, an adopted son named Gerald Jr., but as far as I have been able to find out Gerald Jr. left no surviving children.
[3] Nothing about either the fashions or the automobiles says exclusively 1918 or later.

Unidentified Scenic Beauty, 1911, East Gary

I bought these postcards (postmarked 1911) on Ebay because, at first glance, they seemed to show the view from the hill where I think the Bijou resort was located (now Riverview Park). Once I received them and had a chance to look more carefully at them, I started doubting my first impression. But if not there — where?


(Click on images to enlarge)



"Bend of Deep River" — the Deep River has lots of bends, but one of the most significant is near Riverview Park, where there would also be a bridge carrying a road (now S.R. 51) over the river. But wouldn't you expect to see some evidence of "downtown" East Gary, if the photographer were on the Riverview Park hill pointing the camera more or less north?

He might not have been on a hill. He might have climbed somebody's windmill to get that aerial view.

I scanned these at 1200 dpi to bring out the details. The trees along the road have been planted at such regular intervals that, viewed from a distance against the road, they give the illusion of a line of railroad cars. In the second image (where you can see some farm outbuildings), there's a man working in the field near the right edge. I think the cattle are the same in both pictures — they just moved a bit while the photographer was adjusting the camera's position.

Here's what I get when I put the two images together through Hugin (free panorama software):




The location of the third postcard is even more of a mystery:



This one shows two bridges over the Deep River. I can't tell if the far one is a road or a railroad.

Although there's a spot where Central Avenue crosses a river near a railroad bridge, I can think of at least two problems in the way of identifying this image as showing those two bridges: one, the river by that point is the Little Calumet — the Deep River has already flowed into it and lost its own identity. (On the other hand, the photographer and the person who commissioned the photos might not have known or cared about exactly which river they were looking at.) Two, I'm not sure Central Avenue extended that far in 1911, or had such a nice bridge. Oh, and third, since even today this location is outside the Lake Station city limits, I'm not sure anyone in 1911 would have attached "East Gary" to the description. (On the other hand, it wasn't inside any other city, so why not attribute that scenic beauty to East Gary?)

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Thanks to Steve Shook's research, we already have information about the Crose Photo Co. But what about the person who commissioned the photos, W.E. Ashton?

I believe he was William E. Ashton, shown here in the 1910 Census:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from Ancestry.com.

As the proprietor of a general store, he might have wanted his own exclusive line of postcards.

William was born in Illinois and grew up in DuPage County, I gather. We find him in the 1870 Census in Downers Grove, his father describing himself as a day laborer, and in Hinsdale in the 1880 Census, by which time his father was working as a butcher.

The 1900 Census showed William out on his own, farming in Liberty Township, Porter County. His household included no family, but three boarders — all female; two widowed, one single. The single one was Mabel Lester,[1] whom William married in 1901 (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index). A 1905 directory out of Valparaiso shows them still living along a rural route, and the 1906 plat map of Liberty Township shows their 30-acre farm (I hope I labeled the roads correctly):


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1906Plats/Liberty-1906.jpg.

It appears that the move to East Gary happened sometime between 1906 and 1910. Thus, the Ashtons' stay in East Gary probably was no more than 14 years, at most. The 1920 Census records them in Gary. William worked as a laborer then, employed by a "Bridge Works."

Assuming I've found the right people, by the 1930 Census William and Mabel had moved to Mississippi! There William described himself as a carpenter. Then they came to their senses and moved back to Indiana — to Hobart, in fact, where the 1940 Census recorded them living on West Third Street. William and Mabel described themselves as a retired owner/manager and clerk, respectively, of a grocery store. Later, they moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana (1950 Census).

William died in 1951, Mabel in 1973, and they both were laid to rest in Hobart.

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The three postcards were all sent by the same person. Here they are in the same order as above.


(Click on images to enlarge)





Ellen (last name/maiden name probably Carlson) first sent postcards to her mother, Mrs. J.A. Carlson, and her father (or stepfather), J.A. Carlson. Two days later she sent a third to her sister/maiden aunt/cousin/whatever, Miss Anna Carlson. I have found households with most of those names or initials, but none with all of them, so the Carlsons remain unidentified for now.


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[1] One of the widowed boarders was Mabel's mother, Linna ("Linnie").

Dime Store, Hobart, Indiana, 1957

The photographer climbed up on the checkout counter, I think, to shoot this nice overview of a store interior:


(Click on image to enlarge)

Apparently, if you were a little kid in Hobart in 1957, you wore Buster Brown or nothing. Well, maybe you could get something else at Stommel's.

I like the assortment of goods packed into that small space. In the foreground, tissues; then sewing supplies, like cards of buttons and seam binding, and rolls of ribbon. Beyond the Buster Brown display, shelves full of yarn and socks. Saddle shoes and loafers. Ladies' nylons with reinforced heels. Then more children's clothing against the back wall. Up on the wall, kites and curtains.

The notes on the back of the photo don't tell us which dime store:




It might have been Harvey's, which, contrary to what the old-timer(s) remembered in 1979, didn't burn down until 1961:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 27 Dec. 1961.

But then again we have photos of Elinor's from the 1957 Hobart High School yearbook, supposedly in that same location, so I'm confused.

I believe the Schultz Bros. Variety Store was operating on Main Street in 1957; that's another possibility. It is listed at 313 Main in my 1962 Hobart directory, and according to this 1940 column of Hobart-related news, had been operating in Hobart at least since 1939 (exact location unknown):


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hammond Times, 5 Aug. 1940.

(So why did Almira Kramer and Claude Nelson get married secretly? Anybody know the story?)