Pond Sliders and Good Girls of Ainsworth

It's turtle-rescuing season again, and this time it was a pond slider that got stuck by my fence.


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The folks in the IN Nature Facebook group are divided on whether it's a red-eared slider or a yellow-bellied slider. Too bad I couldn't get a picture of its face.


Maisie alerted me to its presence. Maisie is a good girl.

Automobile Humor (1924) and the Old Abel Place

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Hobart News, 31 Jan. 1924.

And I'm sure some people clipped it out and put it on their windshield, and the next time they were out driving, they kept glancing over smugly at their passengers just waiting for them (the passengers) to say something.

This prompted me to investigate the origin of the term "backseat driver." One source found it as early as 1891 in the U.S. The phenomenon had to exist before the automobile; it's just human nature; but I haven't been able to find information about what people called it.

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A social column in the same issue of the Hobart News contained an update on the ownership of the old Abel homestead:

A deal was recently completed whereby the former Abel property, together with a couple of Gary properties, was transferred by the late owner, Steve Dolato of this city, in exchange for a farm of 320 acres located about 8 miles north of Renssalaer, Ind. owned by Michael Jungles, consideration $44,800. The Dolato family, who have resided here for the past seven months, will move the first of the week to Gary, where they have purchased a home at Eighth and Georgia streets and the Jungles family will remove to their new residence, the old Abel homestead, as soon as it is vacated by Mr. Dolato and family.

The new owners' name was actually spelled Jungels. Michael and Josephine (Gerlach) Jungels were both Illinois natives who had married in 1884. After many years of farming in Jasper County, Indiana, they were approaching retirement age and chose the old Abel place, which still had over 10 acres attached to it. A later Hobart News social column (4 Apr. 1924) mentions a couple of their married daughters' surnames …

Mrs. Michael Jungles came Sunday to the old Abel homestead, which she and Mr. Jungles purchased about the first of the year to be occupied by them as a future home. Mr. and Mrs. Otto Ritter of this city, her son-in-law and daughter, motored to Renssalaer for the purpose of bringing Mrs. Jungles back with them to Hobart. Mr. Jungles will join his wife later. Another daughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Peer, have resided at the former Abel home since the first of March.

Elizabeth Jungels had married Volney Peer in 1907, and Anna Jungels and Otto Ritter were married in 1916, all in Jasper County; but with this move they and the elder Jungelses would become Hobart residents for decades. It is Elizabeth's name that shows up as the owner of the property on the 1926 Plat Map:


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Let us skip ahead to the end of Michael's and Josephine's residence — they departed Hobart, and this world, within three weeks of each other in March 1952.


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 3 Mar. 1952


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 21 Mar. 1952

Elizabeth Peer and Anna Ritter remained Hobart residents to the end of their lives as well. Anna died in 1969, and Elizabeth — who still occupied the old homestead — in 1980.

Bold Jumping Spiders of Ainsworth

This itsy-bitsy spider swung down from the top of the garage doorframe on a single thread of silk.


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It is a Bold Jumping Spider. Their scientific name is Phidippus audax — audax, Latin, meaning bold, daring; and Phidippus, a Greek name meaning "one who spares horses." So, while they are day-hunting carnivores, the horsies need not fear them. It didn't bite me either, even while I was "persuading" it to move off the sidewalk by brandishing a leaf at it.

Easter Greetings

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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.

A New Ainsworth Baby

I came across this little announcement and thought today was a good day to post it, this being Eldon Harms' 102nd birthday anniversary.


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Hobart News, 3 Apr. 1924.

Above the Harms announcement, another Ross Township birth introduces a name I haven't heard before — Herter. If I've found the right people, Peter and Anna Herter, along with little Indiana-born Madeline, were in Wisconsin by the 1930 Census. I shall see if we get any more news of them before they leave Ross Township.

Random items from the same issue — electricity problems in Deepriver, and isn't it nice to have your own Delco plant? Also, road problems around S.R. 51 and 61st Avenue.


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Hobart News, 3 Apr. 1924.

William Kruse, and Elusive Farms

On January 29, 1924, William Kruse died. His obituary tells us how the Kruse schoolhouse got its name.


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Hobart News, 31 Jan. 1924. See also "Wm. Kruse Passes Away," Hobart Gazette, 1 Feb. 1924; "Hobart," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 2 Feb. 1924.

The only record we have of William owning a farm across from the Crown Hill Cemetery shows up in the 1891 Plat Book — his crossed-out name suggesting that he used to own 39.5 acres in Section 20, Twp. 36 N., Range 7 E. (a half-acre having gone to the school) …


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… but had sold it to Wm. H. Rifenburg.

Another connection between William Kruse and the schoolhouse turns up in a Hobart Township Trustee's account book entry dated July 23, 1890:


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

William received $75.50 for a "school house lot" and 8.5 days' labor. Probably $20-$30 of that was labor (if we can judge by the entry below him, where John North got $27.75 for 8 days' labor plus supplying his own team of horses). Since we know this school was in District #5, we can identify a few more entries relating to it: on August 2, P. (Philip?) Roper was paid $27 for 9 days' work by his team of horses (maybe himself as well); and the same day, William Rifenburg received over $400 for supplying lumber for the Districts 5 and 8 schoolhouses. All of this suggests to me that the Kruse schoolhouse was built in the summer of 1890. The Lake County records say it was built in 1925, but I believe that is an error.

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And now, let us speak of farms "near Ainsworth."

I was aware of a large farm southeast of Ainsworth that William Kruse bought sometime after 1891 and sold in 1913 to William and Vena Shults. But that is not the farm mentioned in the obituary.

Here is the 1870 Census showing the 13-year-old William Kruse and his siblings with their parents, Frederick and Johanna, in Ross Township:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Looking at the 1874 Plat Map, we don't find a farm owned by F. Kruse, but we do find one marked "F. Kruser":


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And we need only compare F. Kruser's neighbors on the map to Frederick Kruse's neighbors on the 1870 census to see that the map-maker just added an extra r to confuse future generations.

It's hard for me to imagine exactly where the Kruse house stood, as shown on the 1874 map — I have to imagine Hickory Top with no railroad, and to me the railroad seems as much a part of the landscape as the Deep River. And in 1874 Ainsworth Road still followed its original path. I don't suppose the 1874 map-maker was excruciatingly precise about the placement of the house, as he or she seems to place it in the part of the (present-day) horse pasture north of Ainsworth Road that is low and inclined to flood, and probably was the same way back then.

Here is the Kruse farm marked on the 1939 aerial photo (I'm not entirely sure I've got the boundaries right!):


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Image from https://igws.iu.edu/ihapi/map/

The only structure on the property is the station built when the railroad came through in 1880. No trace remains of the old farmhouse, or cabin, or whatever it was. I do wonder if it might have been picked up and moved across the street, and is now hiding as one of the houses on the west side of S.R. 51 described by the county records as having been built in the 1890s. But there is no way of knowing that.

In 1917 when some of the Chester property was involved in an action to quiet title, one of the names involved was Frederick Kreuser. Which makes me ask myself if perhaps that was the original German spelling of their surname, and they decided that Kruse (which is a perfectly good German surname) seem more American? If so, they were remarkably committed to that one Americanization, since Frederick's grave marker, which is otherwise in German ("hier ruhet in Gott…") and gives his first name as Friedrich, sticks with the Kruse surname; so does Mrs. Kruse's. The other possibility is that — especially if the Kruses were not literate — someone else was writing down their name as they spoke it and imagined some extra letters in the German pronunciation of Kruse.

William shares a grave marker with his wife, Minnie, who died in 1897.

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Emma Dunn, who had looked after William and his family from shortly after Minnie Kruse's death, was also a German immigrant, born circa 1860. I can't trace her before the 1900 census, when she first appears in the Kruse household, widowed, as housekeeper. If I've found the right death certificate, she died in the "Lake County Poor Asylum" on February 1, 1936, and is buried — God knows where.

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.