A Garage at Deep River

As the summer of 1922 approaches, we find the 68-year-old Thomas Strong putting his carpentry skills to work in the village of Deep River … I just wish I knew whose garage it was.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hobart News 1 June 1922.

Below that, we learn that the Hubert and Daisy Bullock family (with their recently graduated son, Elmer, and younger son, Cecil)* are leaving my bailiwick, while (in the "Births" column) John Charles Sapper and Vernon Charles Bothwell are entering it. The "Local Drifts" of the June 2 Hobart Gazette noted that Hubert Bullock had already closed up his auto repair shop in Crown Point and moved the family to South Bend. The W.B. Owen family was still in Hobart, but "Mr. Owen has opened a Paige sales station [in South Bend] and spends most of the time there." Hubert Bullock was to be in charge of the Paige service station.

The two other items marked concern the campground in the McAfee woods, along the Yellowstone Trail. Paul Newman felt compelled to warn his fellow citizens that if they mistreated the campground (e.g., by stealing its pump) or the travelers on the Trail, they were giving their town bad publicity nationwide. On a happier note, the Trinity Lutheran school was planning to hold a grand picnic at the campground.

___________________
*In the 1920 Census I find a Chas. Hendricks living in Hubert's household, but the scan on Ancestry.com is not legible enough for me to determine whether he could be Laura's father. Whoever transcribed the page for Ancestry.com read his relationship to Hubert as "brother-in-law," but I don't think that transcription is correct.

A Little Chicken On the Side

Here's Herman Harms sending a playful postcard to Minnie Rossow in October 1914.


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



His use of a phrase known better in its less grammatically correct form — "how's tricks?" — made me wonder when that got started … which led me to a Dictionary of Catch Phrases that has found the phrase in writing as early as 1904.

I can't trace the source of the last sentence in Herman's message.

Ainsworth Then and Now: Chester Cemetery

1963 and 2015



(Click on images to enlarge)
1963 images courtesy of John Fleck.

The grave markers of Henry Chester and his second wife, Harriet (mother of Daisy Chester Raschka). Those stones look as if they will stand forever.


In the next photo, behind the monument to Amanda, wife of Simeon Marble, we have the graves of (left to right) Henry, Harriet, Mary (Henry's mother), and Charles (Henry's father).




Mary's grave marker now is broken and lying on the ground.


This last one does not show any Chester graves. It was taken towards the west side of the cemetery, furthest from S.R. 51.




Here the cemetery has changed enough that I couldn't figure out how to reproduce the 1963 photo, or if that were even possible.

Elmer Bullock, Crown Point Class of 1922

Elmer Bullock's proud grandmother, along with Mary Kipp and her sisters, went to Crown Point on May 19, 1922, to see him graduate from high school.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hobart News 25 May 1922.

Just above that item we hear from the Carlson brothers, Charles and Richard, whom I thought I wrote about earlier … but if I did, I can't find the story now.

Their fruit farm was on the west side of Grand Blvd./S.R. 51, just a part of the 80-acre farm that had belonged to their parents, Swan Peter and Hedvig Carlson. The 1926 Plat Book does not show ownership for the small parcels in that area. We have to go to the 1939 Plat Book to find a parcel with the name Carlson, which seems to be in roughly the right place, but whether it was exactly the location of the 1922 Carlson farm is something I can't tell you.



In the 1920 Census we find the 42-year-old Charles living in that area with his widowed mother, operating a "market garden." Richard, some ten years younger, was then living in Hobart with his wife, but the wording of the news item suggests they had moved to, or near, the farm by 1922.

♦    ♦    ♦
In the right-hand column we read of the loss of another local Civil War veteran, Conrad Bender.


Additional Source: "Death of Conrad Bender." Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

Hobart Class of 1922: Esther Strong

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Esther was the granddaughter of Thomas and Phoebe Strong. In 1900 her father, Arthur, had married Mary Roper of Hobart (Indiana Marriage Collection). Esther was the oldest of four children. The family ran a dairy farm in southeastern Ross Township, renting land (1920 Census); in 1910 they had occupied "one of Chet Guernsey's farms south of Deepriver" ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 30 Sept. 1910) but may have moved in the 12 years since. Esther had completed the eighth grade at the Deep River schoolhouse ("Ross Township Commencement," Hobart Gazette 18 May 1917).

Esther and her family turned up often in the social news, as they visited family and friends in the area. They had no great tragedies or triumphs.

Maypoles and Gay-Mill Gardens

Tidbits from south of Deep River, late in May 1922:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hobart News 25 May 1922.

The list of Ainsworth graduates confirms my earlier guess (which wasn't exactly genius-level in the first place), and gives a few details about the graduation ceremonies — drills and Maypole dances in an open field that may have been a bit muddy.

So Howard H. Smith, who has been living in an undisclosed location at least since January 1922, when Melvin and Verna Guernsey moved onto his farm, is now building a house on his Porter County land? — and where might that be, I wonder?

Excuse me while I look at Union Township maps on a hunch …

… what do you know, it's right across the county line from his Lake County land.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from http://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/UnionTownshipMaps.html, courtesy of Steven R. Shook.

♦    ♦    ♦
This advertisement for the Gay-Mill Gardens sounds as if May 27, 1922 might be its grand opening …


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hobart Gazette 26 May 1922.

… but if that's the case, then why is the "mirror floor" already famous?

In Dreams of Duneland, Kenneth J. Schoon describes the Gay Mill as "a vibrant dance and social hall with an adjacent hotel and even lakefront houses for rent." It must have seemed quite glamorous to people accustomed to dancing above a blacksmith's shop or in an old schoolhouse, if they ever ventured through the Gay-Mill doors.

Home on Leave

Here's a young sailor doing his best to smile for the camera even though he's freezing.


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

This photo of Richard "Dick" Ensign was taken in front of the Ensign home on South Hobart Road. There is no date, but I suspect it was circa 1945, at which time Dick was 20 or 21 years old.

(At left, in the background, is Eldon Harms; at right, Dick's brother, Bob.)


Here he's looking a bit more comfortable.



Notes on the back of the original say it was taken in the summer of 1945. Location unknown. (Insignia unrecognized, but that's not surprising for me. Wouldn't it have been great if he'd gotten to be Ensign Ensign?)