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.