Bastardy in Merrillville

Local historian Michael White, who has already contributed some interesting material to this blog, has been working at the Calumet Regional Archives and has shared some items he came across that relate to Hobart and Merrillville.

Among them is a disturbing transcript from 1846 of George Earle's interrogation, as a justice of the peace, of a 27-year-old woman named Rachel Campbell. Rachel had brought a complaint of bastardy against William Merrill (one of the brothers who in 1848 gave Merrillville its name). That is to say, of course, that she accused him of fathering her illegitimate child. As we get into the transcript, we find that her testimony brings up an even more serious accusation.

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William Merrill, born in Vermont in 1808, came to Lake County with his younger brother, Dudley, in 1836,[1] settling in the area that eventually became Merrillville. In 1842, he married the 20-year-old Caroline Campbell.[2] That is the earliest vital record I have been able to find for Caroline. From later censuses, we know she was born in Pennsylvania.

Rachel Campbell was also born in Pennsylvania, circa 1817. Her family left Pennsylvania sometime after 1839, and was living in Indiana by about 1846 (or perhaps earlier), as we see by the 1850 Census recording them in Portage Township, Porter County:


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The reason I believe this to be the Rachel Campbell in question is because the trial testimony states that she had a brother named Stephen; also, Rachel's age in 1850 agrees roughly with the age she gives in her 1846 testimony.

The two families are linked in other ways. Another brother listed on the 1850 census, Henry, turns up in Caroline Campbell Merrill's household in 1870. According to A Pictorial History of Merrillville, Caroline eventually sold her farm to Venila, listed as 11 years old in the 1850 census (and who in 1855 married Samuel White).

While it's impossible to establish with certainty the family relationship between Rachel and Caroline, since I can't trace either of them back any further than the early to mid-1840s, I believe they were sisters.

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The transcript of the questioning is a little spotty, but it establishes that the trial is taking place in August of 1846. Rachel starts her testimony with September 1845.


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Image from the Calumet Regional Archives (via Michael White).

At that time, Caroline Campbell Merrill was about six months' pregnant[3] and ill, though not bedridden.[4] Rachel was on an extended visit in Merrill house, probably to help Caroline with her two-year-old daughter and housework. The Merrill house, as Rachel describes it, sounds like a settler's cabin that had been added on to over the years: two sections, east and west (perhaps just two ground-floor rooms), with an upstairs room reached by a staircase in the east room. There was no interior door: to go from one room to the other, you had to walk outside.

One night around the middle of September 1845, Rachel testifies, she had gone to bed alone in the west room around 8 o'clock. (William and Caroline Merrill slept in the east room, and Orrin Pierce,[5] also staying there, slept in the upstairs room.) About an hour later, just as Rachel was drifting off to sleep, William Merrill came into her room, and to her bed. That night, she said, he had sex with her three times over the course of about two hours. Here are Rachel's responses to George Earle's questions:

Question   Had you and he made any previous bargain that he was to come there?

[Answer] No.

Question   Did you make any noise?

[Answer] Not a great deal.

Question   Did he ask you if he might have connection with you?

[Answer] I told him no.

In her laconic way, she is saying he raped her.

There is nothing in the testimony indicating that Rachel told Caroline about this incident. At some point she did tell her mother that William had had sex with her.

Rachel remained in the Merrill house for several more weeks, then apparently left, but returned in the latter part of October. Around the 18th or 20th of October, she says, William came to her in the middle of the night, this time in the east room, and woke her out of sleep to have sex with her again. That was the last time.

She later gave birth to a baby girl, whom she said had been fathered by William.

In another part of her testimony, we learn something interesting about Rachel.

Question   Are you married?

[Answer] I am not.

Question   Were you ever married?

[Answer] Never.

Question   Did you ever have any children before?

[Answer] One.

She had already had one child out of wedlock, at a time when this carried significant social stigma. Rachel was already bearing a social and emotional burden before September 1845. I do wonder how George Earle knew to pursue this line of questioning. Had William Merrill given him information that Caroline had told him privately? Or was Rachel's past indiscretion known among the locals?

At one point in the transcript, the writer notes that it is William ("the defendant") asking Rachel a question ("How old are you?"). I think it is possible that William is asking questions at other times that are not noted. If George Earle is the one asking the questions, evidently he is already familiar with William's defense to the charge of bastardy: namely, that someone else was the baby's father. William may have counted on Rachel's precarious social status to support his implication that she was sexually promiscuous. The questioning introduces two mysterious figures, Mr. Vandermark and Mr. Rowdabaum.

Question   Do you know a person by the name of Vandermark?

[Answer] I do.

. . .

Question   Did you and Mr. Vandermark stay in a house alone during any time between the 15 of September and the 20th of October last?

[Answer] No, at no time.

Question   Did you or did you [not?] stay alone with Mr. Vandermark in a house alone between the 15th day of September and 20th of October last?

[Answer] I did not.

Question   Did you or did you not go with Mr. Vandermark up to his house about the 25th day of October last?

[Answer] I went but don't know the time.

. . .

Question   Who went with you that night?

[Answer] My brother Stephen.

Question   Was Vandermark['s] wife at home?

[Answer] She was not home that night.

Question   Who slept in the room that night?

[Answer] Vandermark, Stephen and Rowdabaum & wife.

Question   Who slept with you?

[Answer] No body.

Question   Did Mr. Vandermark lay on the foot of your bed that night?

[Answer] He did not.

Question   Had you connection with Mr. Rowdabaum that night?

[Answer] I had not.

No doubt these two men existed, since Rachel says so herself, but I have searched in history books, censuses, and other records, using these names and variations I could think of (e.g., Van der Mark, Raudebaum) and failed to find the slightest bit of information about them.

We have nothing directly from William Merrill's side of the case. I do not know if he entirely denied ever having sex with Rachel, or rather said that it would be unfair to deem him the father when, as he seemingly argued, there were at least two other candidates.

Nor do we know the verdict in this case.


The original handwritten transcript, courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives (via Michael White): click here

My transcription, with some punctuation and spelling altered for clarity: click here

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I am inclined to believe Rachel — maybe because I tend to root for the underdog. William Merrill was 38 years old, a family man, an established businessman, a justice of the peace,[6] among the most prominent citizens in his small town. Rachel was a 27-year-old single woman with skeletons in her closet, from an obscure farming family.

I do not know if this Campbell family was related to the more prominent Campbells of Porter County, some of whom also came from New York, like Rachel's father, Henry.


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Image from Ancestry.com.

That is to say — I assume Henry is her father. I should learn not to make assumptions, though. When I first started researching the case and found this family, I assumed that this census listing, like so many others I've seen, recorded a father and his six children. And I wondered what had become of Rachel's children! Now I realize they are probably hiding in plain sight, right there. Semira is four years old, just the age to have been born in 1846 to Rachel. And Venila, 11 years old, was born back in Pennsylvania when Rachel was about 22 years old: it is certainly possible that Venila was Rachel's first child.

As I've said, there were some Campbells in Porter County whose lives and deaths are recorded. These Campbells are not among them. These Campbells seem to have come out of nowhere and, for the most part, slipped away into the unknown: for example, Rachel's mother — I don't even know her name — who evidently was living in the 1840s, when Rachel told her of the incident with William, but who is nowhere to be found in the 1850 census. I cannot find any recorded death notice or grave for her.[7] Likewise, Henry Campbell (the elder), after the 1850 census, simply vanishes.

As for Rachel's brother, Stephen — well, I can find numerous Stephen Campbells after 1850, including some in Indiana, but none that I can positively connect with this family. The same goes for "Lou," the 22-year-old sister noted in the margin of the 1850 census — never positively identified again.

Rachel's brother Henry (and Rachel herself) may be at the Porter County Poor Farm in the 1860 census.[8] By 1870, Henry was in the household of Caroline Campbell Merrill. As you may know, William Merrill had died in 1860.

In 1875, Caroline married William's brother, Dudley (3 months after the death of his third wife). Their cozy household in 1880 does not include Henry Campbell. He, I believe, was in the Lake County "Asylum," aka the Poor Farm, which lists a 46-year-old native of Pennsylvania by that name among its inmates in the 1880 census. I can't trace Henry further than that. He may be lying in an unmarked grave on the former poor-farm grounds. Caroline, on the other hand, lived another nine comfortable years, dying in 1889.

While trying to trace little Semira Campbell of the 1850 census, I was surprised to find another young woman of about the same age, with the same unusual name; but the other Semira Campbell was born in Vermont, not Indiana. So the story of our little four-year-old is uncertain.

Rachel herself can be traced as far as 1860. If she was indeed in the Porter County Poor Farm in June 1860, when that census was taken, by the time the Lake County census was taken in July, we find her in Venila Campbell White's household, in Center Township, Lake County:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

After that, I cannot find her living or dead.

Aside from Caroline, Venila is the only one whose life story I can follow to the end. In 1855, when she was about 16, she and Samuel White slipped over the border to Berrien County, Michigan, to be married. As we just saw above in the 1860 census, they came back to Center Township to farm and begin a family. I expect they were somewhere local in the 1870 census, though the search function on Ancestry.com can't find them. In 1880 they were farming in Ross Township. By 1900, they were living in the Merrillville area, no longer farming, but well fixed enough for Samuel to describe himself as a "capitalist." In 1908, Samuel died. The 1910 census shows Venila in Merrillville, living alone on her own income. In the spring of 1915, she decided to move to Cozad, Nebraska[9] to join her daughter, Sarah — her only surviving child — who in 1877 had married Byron Dutton. The following year, Venila died, and was brought home to Merrillville for burial.


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Cozad Local (Cozad, Dawson County, Nebr.), 25 Feb. 1916.

In all the censuses that asked for parents' birthplaces, Venila gave, as both her father's and her mother's birthplace, Pennsylvania — not New York, as she should have said if Henry Campbell, Sr., was her father. Now, this may reflect the inability of a stressed family to pass along its own history, or confusion in Venila's memory … but maybe she was right.


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[1] Lake County 1834-1872 at 38.
[2] Indiana Marriage Collection. She was his second wife, according to a family genealogy on Ancestry.com, his first having died circa 1836 after bearing two children. One of those children, George, is listed in the household of William and Caroline in the 1850 census.
[3] Caroline and William's son, John, was born December 30, 1845 (Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index).
[4] I am drawing this and the following information from the transcript, which I will append in full below. The questioning is hard to follow — it jumps from topic to topic, including topics that have no seeming relevance — so I have to piece together the various incidents as best I can.
[5] Orrin Pierce (1813-1895) came to Lake County from New York sometime in the early to mid-1840s; in June 1845 he married Ruth Vincent in Lake County.
[6] This we know from a document relating to another (less sensational) 1846 case involving William Merrill.
[7] There is one interesting stone in the Hebron Cemetery that is just legible enough to make out the surname Campbell and the death date in August 1850 (the census was taken in October).
[8] There is a listing in Center Township, Porter County, of a Henry Campbell who is approximately the right age, and a pauper at the Porter County Poor Farm, along with a Rachel Campbell, who is not the right age — but then whoever gave the enumerator his information did not even know where the two Campbells were born.
[9] "Merrillville," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 17 Mar. 1915.

The Slow Death of a Veteran

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From the Hobart High School's "Memories" yearbook of 1921.
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

He didn't die in action, or even in the service, but World War I killed John Small anyway, according to the Hobart News.


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Hobart News, 20 Dec. 1923. See also "Death Summons John E. Small," Hobart Gazette, 21 Dec. 1923.

If I understand the family tree correctly, this John Small was the grandson of John and Mary Jane Small, who (I believe) gave Small's Crossing its name. The farm he grew up on seems to have been in southwest Portage Township, Porter County, based on neighbors' names in the 1900 census and several parcels owned by Smalls in that area on the 1906 plat map. By 1910 his parents had retired from farming and moved their family to the village of Wheeler. In 1920 John and his wife, Martha, were living in Hobart, where John gave his occupation as a teacher in a public school — modestly, perhaps, if the News was correct about his being the high school principal by then.

Martha remarried in 1935, to a widower named Ralph Orr, but when she died in 1975, her remains were brought home from Indianapolis to be laid to rest beside John.

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Moving from the serious to the silly, we note (in the lower right of the page above) that a Hobart night marshal resigned from his position under a cloud. According to an earlier article, he had been suspended after being accused of not only drunkenness, but also poker-playing ("Night Marshal Carrier Suspended," Hobart Gazette, 14 Dec. 1923).

"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.

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.

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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.