Tornado v. Gas Station

Back when I posted about the Illiana Hotel sign in the bottom of a ravine, a reader suggested that it might have been blown there by a tornado that demolished a gas station at Route 30 and Randolph. The gas station, so I understand, had a number of signs like that on the walls.

I recently came across the Gazette story about the tornado and the gas station:


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Elsewhere the business was described as a "general store and gas station owned by Frank Horan,"[1] whom I can't identify with greater specificity.

On this 1958 aerial view, we find some kind of building already in existence on that corner (marked with a red arrow):


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Image from the Indiana State Archives.

Here's an aerial view from 1978:


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Image from the Lake County Surveyor GIS Website.

It doesn't look as if the gas station had been rebuilt, but the resolution of the image is not good. There is something about the size of a semi-trailer sitting on the lot. [9/17/2024 update: A long-time local resident tells me that Frank did not rebuild after the tornado. The land stood vacant until recently. The gas station/store had been very small, with one gas pump and, inside, a counter, some shelves with bread, candy, and cigarettes, along with a little cooler for such things as soda. Frank made much of his money repairing tires for semis traveling on Route 30. The family lived in the back of the building.]

The furthest I can go back in Google street view is 2009, at which time there was no sign that anything had ever been built on that corner.

(By the way, I have totally failed to identify the Hickory Grove Farm on the Old Lincoln Highway near County Line Road, also mentioned in the Gazette article above.)

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This is the first time in my 15 years of blogging that I'm indexing the surname Horan, and yet, looking at the census records, I find them in Union Township, Porter County, as early as 1930. And in the 1950 Census, there is a whole crowd of them there:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

In Center Township, the name goes back to the 19th century. However, as I said, I've not been able to determine whether Frank Horan, of the demolished gas station, was related to any Porter County Horans.


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[1] "Tornado Kills DeMotte Resident," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 13 Mar. 1976.