Love and Death at the Ainsworth Crossing

For Fred Ahrens, the 1920s started out with grief upon grief. In February 1920, he lost his mother to complications of influenza. In February 1921, his 38-year-old wife, Mollie, died of tuberculosis. Fred was left with a young daughter and son to raise. He moved into his widowed father's house, where his sister, Mary, could help with the children. His former home became a rental property.

In May of 1923, the house got a new tenant, a former Chicago resident named Catherine McManus. She had something in common with Fred: she too had lost a spouse and was raising a daughter and son on her own. Her husband, Matthew, had died in 1918. For a few years after her loss, Catherine had remained in Chicago, working as a waitress and taking in boarders to make ends meet.

Catherine probably was familiar with Hobart long before she moved there. Her married sister was a Hobart resident for some ten years before moving to Gary. Their mother, Carolina (Lena), had been one of the local Springmans by birth. Lena's first husband (Catherine's father) was Nicholas Semmer, whose parents had farmed in Ross Township in the mid-19th century before relocating to Chicago. Her second husband was Fred Maybaum. So Catherine had many local relations, and surely friends and acquaintances too. Fred Ahrens may have been among the latter.

He soon became something more. These two bereaved hearts found solace in each other. Catherine and Fred fell in love, decided to marry, and quietly told their family and friends of their decision.

Since the two of them were an item, it was natural for them to travel together to the surprise birthday party planned for Rollie Sizelove, an Ainsworth-area farmer, on the evening of January 9, 1924. They would drive south from Hobart on present-day State Road 51, cross the Grand Trunk tracks at Ainsworth, turn right onto Ainsworth Road to reach the Lincoln Highway, then west to Colorado and north to the Sizelove farm.

But their journey ended at the Ainsworth crossing.


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Hobart News, 10 Jan. 1924.


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Hobart Gazette, 11 Jan. 1924.

There was no indication that Fred might have been trying to beat the train, as in the case of an earlier accident at this railroad crossing. It seems that he simply didn't notice it in time to react.


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Hobart News, 17 Jan. 1924.


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"General News," Hobart Gazette, 18 Jan. 1924.

A double funeral for Fred and Catherine, held at the Evangelical Lutheran Church, was widely attended.[1] They were laid to rest in the Hobart Cemetery.[2]

The surviving family members thanked their friends and neighbors as one:


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Hobart News, 17 Jan. 1924.

The orphaned children all had relatives willing to give them a home:


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"Local and Personal," Hobart News, 17 Jan. 1924.


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[1] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 18 Jan. 1924.
[2] Catherine's grave is listed on findagrave.com and in the NWIGS's Hobart Township Cemeteries. Fred's grave does not appear in either source; nor does his wife's (Mollie).

Merrillville Then and Now: 73rd Avenue at Madison

Yet another view of the Walter Bros. garage, from a postcard I bought a few months ago. The photographer, C.R. Childs, stood along present-day 73rd Avenue and pointed his camera east toward Madison.


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Here's a screenshot from Google street view, 2024:

Image courtesy of Google Maps.

In spite of its stylish design, which I totally love, the back of the postcard is not helpful for purposes of fixing its date …



… but we know it dates to 1913 or later, since the photo is captioned "Lincoln Highway."

I consulted the Ainsworth vintage-car expert for further help, and he tells me:

There are a couple of cars (like the one closest on the right) that appear to be Model T Fords (not new looking). Ford's last year for gas headlights was 1914. Headlights were electric after 1914 and the car on the right appears to have gas lights. Walter Brothers sold Buicks and the truck in the doorway could be a late teens Buick delivery truck. The cars on the highway fit the 1916/1917 timeframe.

So I'm estimating the date of this photo to be circa 1917.

Concerning the starting date of the Walter Bros. garage business, A Pictorial History of Merrillville says this:

Like their father, Ernest "Cheese Henry" Walter, the three sons, Howard, Leslie, and Clarence, were capable business men who undertook their enterprise in 1917 when they were only 18, 20, and 21 years of age, respectively.

At first, the young entrepreneurs operated out of Elbert's Garage, an old wooden building; later they relocated to the Keilman building on the southwest corner West 73rd Avenue and Madison Street [i.e., where this photo was taken].

But in the on-line local newspapers, I found this 1913 item:


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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 2 Dec. 1913, p. 6.

This seems to say that they were already running a car-rental business in 1913, at which time Howard (b. 1893) was 20, Leslie (b. 1895) was 18, and Clarence (b. 1897) was 16.

I also found this 1915 item:


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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 10 Apr. 1915, p. 7.

So they were selling Fords and Overlands already.

But I found nothing to specify where their business was located at any particular time.

"Going to the (Something) With It"

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


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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.

"Killed By a Fall from a Wagon"

Another entry from the Jeremiah Wiggins estate papers. (We are close to the finish line.)


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Images courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.

My transcription:

State of Indiana    Lake County
Received of Henry Miller a Noat of two Dollars and fifty Cts payable to mr. Sherman

May the 28 — 1838
        Jere'h Wiggins

The notes on the back establish that Mr. Sherman's first name was William:



I'm not sure I understand how this transaction came about — maybe something like this: Jeremiah owed Henry Miller money but didn't have cash on hand, so he undertook Henry's obligation to pay off a note to William Sherman when it came due. Two and a half months later, Jeremiah was dead and the note hadn't been paid off. Of course, William wanted his money.


William Sherman settled in Lake County in 1837.[1] Various family trees on Ancestry.com say he was born in New Hampshire in 1784 (although I haven't yet found one that cites a source for that). According to T.H. Ball, William married Calista (more usually spelled Celista) Smith in 1807 in New York.[2]

The 1840 Census records William and (probably) Celista, with six other people in the household — their children, I would guess. T.H. Ball said that William was the father of 13 children in total,[3] but some may have been out of the house already, and some yet to enter it.

Tragedy struck in 1843. T.H. Ball quotes, from an unnamed diary, an entry for September 16, 1843: "This morning Mr. Sherman was found dead, killed by a fall from a wagon."[4] He was presumed to have died the previous day, according to his grave marker.

Celista never remarried. She died October 1, 1884 at nearly 96 years of age.


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Untitled social column, Crown Point Register, 2 Oct. 1884, p. 3

James Luther was her son-in-law, the widower of her daughter, also named Celista, who had died in 1881:


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Crown Point Register, 8 Dec. 1881.

I believe the "old Sherman farm" may have been the southwest quarter of Section 21 (east of Grant Street, south of 129th), which William Sherman bought (160 acres) per Early Land Sales, Lake County (although the sale was dated December 1843, and there was a William Sherman, Jr.).

The younger Celista's obituary gives the impression (doesn't it?) that her parents, native New Englanders, made a detour through Canada before coming to Lake County.

Writing in 1904, T.H. Ball noted that "the living descendants of these Lake county Shermans numbered, a few years ago, fifty-two."[5] I shall not try to account for that many people.

♦    ♦    ♦
The other party to this transaction, Henry Miller, is just a brief blip on the radar. He gets this one mention in T.H. Ball's discussion of the Squatters' Union (quoting I think, from the Union's records):

"1837, March 16. This day an arbitration was held between Denton and Henry Miller and John Reed, who had gone on to Millers' claim and built a cabin, and the Arbitrators decide that Reed shall give up the cabin to Millers, and pay the costs of this arbitration, but that Millers shall pay Reed seventeen dollars for the cabin which he has built."[6]

Then he disappears.

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[1] Lake County 1834-1872 at 56.
[2] Lake County Encyclopedia at 97.
[3] Lake County Encyclopedia at 97).
[4] Lake County 1834-1872 at 89.
[5] Lake County Encyclopedia at 97.
[6] Lake County 1834-1872 at 49.

Losing Lucy

I missed the good part, back when I wrote up a short bio of Levi D. Jones. The good part is how he lost his third(?) wife in August 1857, half a year after marrying her:[1]


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Crown Point Register, 4 Aug. 1857.

It gets even better: apparently, he got her back for a while, and then lost her again in February 1858.


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Crown Point Register, 16 Feb. 1858.

In case you can't read it:

WARNING

This is to forbid all persons harboring or trusting my wife Lucy Jones, after this date, as she has left my bed and board, without just cause or provocation.

Levi. D. Jones
Ross February 11th, 1858.

I don't think he found her again after that. In the 1860 Census, Levi is living with (I believe) his daughter from the previous marriage, and no one else. Lucy is back home with her parents:[2]


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Notice the three "Jones" children and their ages in the census — George (9), Sydney (4), and Mary (2) — and remember that Lucy married Levi Jones in December 1856. So George can't be the product of that marriage, and Sydney also is questionable.

Let's take a little detour, and speed over to George's death in 1924. According to his death certificate, his parents were Lucy Sly …


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Image from Ancestry.com.

… and Jacob Bigelow. I have not been able to find any record of marriage between those two. Nor can I positively identify Jacob Bigelow.[3]

As for Sydney, people on Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com believe he was actually Seneca Bigelow, born to Jacob and Lucy (Sly) Bigelow in November 1853.

But getting back to Lucy — we next catch up with her in July 1864, when she married William Brown in Berrien County, Michigan.[4] That was just an elopement, I believe; their permanent home was Porter County, where we find them in the 1880 Census:[5]


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The interesting thing we learn here (aside from the fact that Lucy is completely illiterate) is that William has a 25-year-old stepson named Simon Bigelow. Maybe the enumerator got Seneca/Sydney's name wrong, or maybe that's his middle name.

William Brown died in 1897. In August 1902, Lucy married Samuel Scott, who was some 35 years her junior. The marriage did not work out:


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La Porte County News (Union Mills, Ind.), 12 Feb. 1903.

Somewhere, perhaps in the next world, Levi D. Jones was laughing.

Lucy died in Michigan City in 1912. Here is her death certificate:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Martha Eckert, the informant, was Lucy's daughter. I find it interesting that Martha didn't know her maternal grandmother's name. Also, Lucy is described as widowed, but Samuel Scott outlived her by 30-plus years.

If you have the urge to stand at Lucy's grave and pay your respects, you'll need to go to Michigan City.

Seneca/Sydney/Simon Bigelow died, alas, in Chicago in 1941, meaning that his death certificate is not readily available and his obituary does not give his family background.

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[1] Per the Indiana Marriage Collection, they took out a marriage license in July 1857, and married in December 1857.
[2] Their farm was probably in west-southwestern Ross Township, based on the few of their neighbors I've been able to find on the 1874 Plat Map. (By 1874, Lucy's parents and married brother Russell had relocated to Michigan, and both parents had died.)
[3] Someone by that name was buying land in Porter County in 1837, but I can't find him in any census in this area. There was also a Jacob Bigelow involved in the planning City West (see Lake County 1929 at 183). I just don't know if that was the man who married Lucy Sly.
[4] Ancestry.com. Michigan, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1822-1940 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.
[5] Neither I nor anyone else, apparently, can find them in the 1870 census.

One Bushel of Buckwheat, One Eternal Mystery

Henry Wells sold Jeremiah Wiggins one bushel of buckwheat in 1837. He also sold him one other thing, but we'll all go to our graves not knowing what it was.



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Images courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.
I had to include the back of the paper just to prove that the amount owed to Wells was $1.00, not $100.

My transcription:



As you can see, if I transcribed "one" correctly in the buckwheat line, then the next line also contains the word "one." But that's the only legible thing in that line.


Henry Willmarth Wells was born in Massachusetts in 1801. Eventually he went west to Michigan, although I do not know when. Solon Robinson describes Henry Wells' coming into Lake County thusly:

On [November 1, 1834], Henry Wells, and Luman A. Fowler, came along on foot, in search of locations. They left their horses back on 20 mile prairie. Cedar Lake was then the center of attraction for land lookers, and thither these, like others, wended their way, without thinking to inquire who kept tavern there. They found a lodging in a leafy tree top, and the leg of a roasted coon for supper. They also found David Horner (father of Amos and Henry), his son Thomas and a man by the name of Brown, looking for claims, upon which they settled the next year, lived there a few years and flitted again. Wells and Fowler came back to our camp next day [in the area of the future Crown Point], so tired and hungry and sick of the country, that they would have sold the whole, Esau like, for a mess of pottage. But after a supper sweetened with honey and hunger, and a night's rest upon the softest kind of a white oak puncheon, the next morning being a bright sunny one, the land looked more inviting, and they bought the claim and two log cabin bodies built by one Huntley upon the south half of Sec. 8, T. 34, R. 8, for which they paid him $50 in cash. Of course cash must have been more plenty with them then than it is now.

Wells went back to his family near Detroit, and Fowler spent the eventful winter of 1834-5 with us in the solitude of the first settlement of what soon became known as Robinson's Prairie. Fowler returned to Detroit in the spring, got married in the fall and returned with his wife and Wells' wife and child, and settled upon their claims. Wells arrived shortly after, and both families have since multiplied after the fashion of all new settlers.

Henry's wife was Adaline (née Witherell, according to family trees on Ancestry.com[1]), but I can't find any records of where and when they married. Together they raised five children.

Henry was very active in Lake County affairs. T.H. Ball notes among his accomplishments: that in 1836 he helped to draw up the constitution of the Squatters' Union (and served as one of its arbitrators); that he was appointed the county's first sheriff upon its organization in 1837, and then went on to serve out the terms of two elected sheriffs before being elected to the office himself for another eight years; that he was one of the commissioners handling funds from the sale of "swamp lands" during the 1850s, but was not implicated in the scandal that arose concerning those funds; and that he was a director of the Lake County Agricultural Society formed in 1851.[2] I believe he was also Treasurer of Lake County at one point.

Here is Henry's obituary, published in the Crown Point Register of May 18, 1876:


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Now he sleeps in Crown Point's Maplewood Historic Cemetery, and with him sleeps the secret of what he sold Jeremiah Wiggins, besides that bushel of buckwheat.


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[1] The 1906 death certificate of their son, Rodman, gives her maiden name as Witheral; the 1918 death certificate of his brother, Homer, gives it as Eddy.
[2] Lake County 1834-1872.

A Sad New Year's Day in 1839

On January 1, 1839, Solon Robinson lost his brother and business partner, Milo, to tuberculosis.[1] The settlement of Milo's estate turned out to involve Jeremiah Wiggins' estate.


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Image courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.

My transcription:


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Milo had come out from New York City in November of 1835 to join Solon in Indiana.[2] In the winter of 1836-7, the brothers opened a store — the first in Lake County — in the settlement that would be the future Crown Point. According to Solon, during that first winter,

we … sold about $3000 worth of goods [over $100,000 in today's money] out of that little old log cabin adjoining the one now [in 1847] used as a Court House.

The best of our customers were the Pottawattomies, who then dwelt here in considerable numbers. (With them commenced my first efforts of a temperance reformation.) Of them we obtained great quantities of furs and cranberries, in pay for goods, (while those calling themselves far superior to the poor Indians in all the moral attributes, gave us promises to pay, some which are promises to this day.)

When Milo died two years later, he was about 38 years of age, and unmarried (so far as I have been able to determine).


The administrator of Milo's estate, Oscar Robinson, may have been another brother, born in 1809 and christened Jacob Oscar. It's odd that Solon doesn't mention him in his history, nor does T.H. Ball. An Oscar Robinson shows up in a Hobart merchant's records in October 1836 (buying ague syrup):


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

And a Jacob Robbinson is recorded in the Porter County 1840 census. Then the trail goes cold.[3]


Another character in this episode is likewise mysterious: Wilson L.[4] Harrison, of whom Solon Robinson has this to say:

During the same winter [of 1836-7], the first mill in the county was put in operation by Wilson L. Harrison, so that we were able to get a little oak lumber in the spring of '37 for $15 a thousand.

Beyond that, neither Solon Robinson nor T.H. Ball says anything. The 1840 Census shows a Wilson Harrison heading up a household of four in Porter County, but his age is given as 15 to 20, meaning that if this is the person who put into operation the first sawmill in Lake County in 1837, he was between 13 and 17 at the time![5]

The merchants' records at the Hobart Historical Society museum that I have indexed so far turn up a couple of references to Wilson L. Harrison. This one is from June 4, 1837:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

And this one is from January 13, 1841:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

After 1841 I cannot find any record of him. Where he came from and where he went remain a mystery.

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[1] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 63. The location of Milo's grave seems to be unknown.
[2] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 34.
[3] Some people on Ancestry.com seem to think he was the Oscar L. Robinson who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then moved to Chicago, where he died in 1878 or 1880. By the way, Solon Robinson had a son, Solon Oscar, born in 1831; not that that proves anything.
[4] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 50 gives his middle initial as S, but no other source does, and in the writing above, the middle initial resembles the L in "Lake County."
[5] Wild hypothesis: the guy in the census is Wilson L. Harrison, Jr., whose father, the mill-builder, had just died. (But none of the history books mentions his death.)