On His Toes!

John and Lillian Call had been living in a rented home in Hobart when the 1920 census came around and, I suppose, when their first child was born. In the spring of 1921 they bought their own house and their own lot, but it seems the two were not at first in the same place. It was easier to bring the house to the lot than vice versa … which is not to say it was easy to move the house.


(Click on image to enlarge)

Also, a little news of other people we know, including a new way to spell Grabowski, but we're going to stick with the old way. And Theodore Rossow's little daughter was sick. Who (I asked myself) was Theodore Rossow? I believe he was "Uncle Theodore" to our Minnie Rossow Harms, being her father's brother … only I don't know what his family was doing "southwest" of Hobart, since the censuses (1910 through 1930) show them living on their own land in Union Township, Porter County; the 1921 plat map of Union Township shows this Rossow farm in the northwest corner of Union Township, which is southeast of Hobart. Perhaps the "southwest" in the News item was a misprint.


To return for a moment to the Calls' house-moving — while the item above suggests it was expensive, we must go to a second item on another page to find out that it actually cost John much more than he'd expected:




Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 5 May 1921.

A Corn-Husker Victim in Later Life

Lately at the Hobart Historical Museum I've been paging through a large collection of arrest reports from the Hobart police department that begin in 1938 and run through the mid-1940s. Thus far it's mostly been petty crime — trespassing on railroad property, speeding, double-parking, U-turns on Main Street, petty larceny, runaway boys. Now and then an assault and battery. A couple suspicion-of-involuntary-manslaughters in the wake of a fatal car accident, but so far those cases were cleared by the coroner. The most common crime seems to be public intoxication, and that's also where we see the most repeat offenders. One name that keep coming up is William Witt. He's in his fifties, gives his occupation as laborer, sometimes teamster, and his most distinguishing characteristic is that his right arm has been amputated.

He sounds to me like the same William Witt who lost his arm to a corn husker in 1901, at the age of nineteen.

That's sad. Not to say that alcoholics always have a reason for being alcoholics, but if I'd had my right arm violently injured and cut off, I might take to drink too. Especially considering the degree to which a person who suffered such an injury, in those days, was simply left to deal with it on his own. Prosthetics, particularly for arms and hands, were crude. Physical therapy, psychological counseling — did they even exist?

More Chester Misfortune

Continuing on the topic of amputation, I came across an incident too horrifying to be treated as a statistic.

It happened on Charles Chester's farm when he was living in Section 19 of Hobart Township, northwest of Hobart. On the morning of Saturday, February 15, he and his eight-year-old son were sawing wood with a horse-power attachment. (Going by the 1900 Census, the eight-year-old would have been his stepson Arthur.)

I'm no expert on historical farm machinery, but I found a photo of a "horse power" attached to a sawmill, and here's a video of the mechanism in action. This may have been the sort of arrangement they were working with.

At first the boy was walking around the horse power, driving the horses. After a while, Charles somehow fixed up a seat for the boy atop the horse-power platform. The child was on that platform when disaster struck. The Hobart Gazette explained: "[I]n some manner the lad lost his balance and in falling reached out his left arm. His fingers caught between the cogs of the large and small wheel and [literally] ground his arm to the shoulder before the machine was stopped."

The family quickly sent for help. Dr. Joseph Watson of Hobart treated the boy, but couldn't save his arm — it had to be amputated at the shoulder.

A little more than two weeks later, the boy returned to school. No physical therapy? No counseling? The modern mind boggles.

The Gazette concluded by saying that the boy's "recovery is somewhat remarkable and Mr. Chester speaks in great praise of Dr. Watson …."

Sources:
♦ "Boy Loses An Arm." Hobart Gazette 21 Feb. 1902.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 7 March 1902.

. . . And the Corn Husker Taketh Away

A few things jar my modern sensibilities as I read these early-20th-century newspapers — the casual, blatant racism; the number of people killed by railroad trains; and the frequency with which people lost body parts, especially fingers, hands and arms. That last one is today's topic.

Many of those body parts were lost on farms to a machine called a corn husker, also called a husker-shredder, which I believe looked like this.

Just a sampling of injuries from the Ainsworth-Deep River-Hobart area:

• In November of 1900, Jude Blachly got the index finger of his left hand caught in a corn husker. A prominent Hobart physician, Dr. Mackey, treated the wound but ended up having to amputate the finger at the first joint.
• In April of 1901, Edward Maybaum lost a thumb to a corn husker.
• In November of 1901, 19-year-old William Witt's arm was so badly crushed in a corn husker that it had to be amputated.
• In November of 1903, Schuyler Hardesty's hand was mangled in a corn husker; the thumb and first two fingers had to be amputated at the hand.
• Also in November 1903, John Witt lost the ends of two fingers.

Those last two incidents appeared in an article entitled, "Corn Husker Did It." People were well aware of the dangers of that machine. In November 1901 — in the wake of President McKinley's assassination by a self-proclaimed anarchist — the Gazette said, "An Indiana paper suggests a worthy position for anarchists by giving them a job feeding a corn husker."

The corn husker was not the only culprit. For example, in June 1902, Frank Maybaum lost a finger to a machine in the East Tolleston furniture factory where he worked; three months later a young man pressing grapes had three fingers on his right hand mangled, and they had to be amputated.


Sources:
♦ "Corn Husker Did It." Hobart Gazette 6 Nov. 1903.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 5 Apr. 1901.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 15 Nov. 1901.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 19 Sept. 1902.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 9 Nov. 1900.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 27 June 1902.