Uncle Adolph

I don't think that I have previously posted this exact, precise view looking north up Center Street from its intersection with Third, in Hobart.


(Click on images to enlarge)

Per the caption, the postcard is intended to show the post office, which was housed in the late, lamented Guyer building from March 3, 1910 up to February 1923.[1] The building on the right would be the Amazon restaurant. The 1910 Sanborn map shows that, aside from a small storage building on the north side of the Amazon, all other buildings in that block were homes.

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On the verso, we find that we are dealing with another Henning postcard.



The postmark is December 3, 1912. The recipient is Elmer Henning, the five-year-old son of Frank and Bertha Henning.

The sender is his Uncle Adolph — ostensibly; but Adolph was only seven years old at the time (born to Theodore and Minnie Henning in 1905), and I'm not sure that looks like the handwriting of a seven-year-old child. Here's what I think happened: Theodore and Minnie took their family to visit Frank, Bertha, and Elmer; and when they got back home (which may have been their Ross Township farm, or perhaps by 1912 they had moved to Crown Point), Adolph said he wanted to send a postcard to Elmer, so one of his parents or older siblings wrote what he wanted to say. It probably was a thrill for him to send the card, and a thrill for little Elmer to receive it.


Sadly, Adolph died a few months before his 26th birthday, on May 4, 1931 (Indiana Death Certificates).


Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 May 1931.

He is buried in Crown Point's Maplewood Cemetery.


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[1] Dorothy Ballantyne and Robert Adams, Along the Route: A History of Hobart, Indiana, Post Offices and Postmasters (The Hobart Historical Society, Inc., 1979, rev. 1992).