Ols-Thomas Wedding

We have already seen a photo of Evalene (however you spell it) Ols; if it was taken after April 26, 1922, she was already Mrs. Dewey Thomas:

Miss Evalene M. Ols, second eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Crist Ols, who reside southeast of Hobart, and Dewey Thomas, of Brems, Ind., were united in marriage at Crown Point, Ind., on Wednesday, April 26. Immediately following the ceremony they left for the groom's home, where he is engaged in farming, and where for the present they intend to reside.

The young couple have many friends in their respective communities who wish for them a happy and prosperous life together.

At first I thought "Brems, Ind." was a misprint. I had never heard of such a town. You can still find it on Google maps, these days, but you'll need a magnifying glass.*

I wonder if Dewey was any kin to Auvergne Thomas Fleck — both being from Starke County families — but then Thomas is not such an unusual surname.

Dewey was born in 1899 into a large farming family in Starke County. By 1920 the family had moved to LaPorte County. Perhaps after 1920 Dewey went back to Starke County to farm on his own account. But by 1930 he and Evalene (and their three children, as well as Evalene's brother, Ervin) were living in Merrillville, and Dewey worked in a sheet mill.

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Back near Ainsworth, at the former Deep River schoolhouse, now the property of Edward and Tillie Niksch, dances were becoming a regular thing. An ad for a dance on Saturday, May 13, promised good music, admission 50 cents. The ad for the next dance assured the public that "everyone who attended the last dance there … had a good time."

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*You'll need a magnifying glass for Ainsworth, too.


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ "Local and Personal," Hobart News 4 May 1922; 19 May 1922.
♦ "Thomas-Ols." Hobart News 4 May 1922.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Duck

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

Handwritten on the back of the original:

Mayme Fleck and Mrs. Ed. Fleck
Centennial Parade
July, 1947.

We've previously met Mayme (Brand) Fleck. For the Hobart Centennial parade, she dressed up as a clown and had a duck walking with her. The poor duck got so tired that she had to carry it. She was pretty tired herself, as those big feet were hard to walk in — so her daughter tells me.

Mrs. Ed Fleck had been Auvergne Thomas when she married Edmund Fleck in Starke County in 1917 (Indiana Marriage Collection). They lived in Hobart from the 1920 Census onward.

This photo was taken on Third Street, west of the bridge. In the background you can see the sign of the Tower Mobilgas filling station.

New Location for Old Schoolhouse

In April 1922 came the time for Hobart's first schoolhouse to make way for a new Masonic hall.


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Hobart Gazette 28 Apr. 1922.

The News reported on the schoolhouse's move a little more quietly.


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"Local and Personal," Hobart News 27 Apr. 1922.

The family who had occupied the old schoolhouse until its move may have included Irene Slaughter, who appeared in the 1920 Census as a 37-year-old widow supporting herself by dressmaking; she was then living alone in a rented house on Center Street near the Mackey home. (In an overwhelmingly white town, she was the only person in that vicinity with a "B" marked in the "Color or Race" column.)


Above that item, we learn that William Newman (whoever he may have been) had visited "Hogan" Zobjeck, better known as Hugo, whose Porter County farm I still have not identified.

Scenic View of Lake George

Slightly different from the one I posted before, this view of downtown Hobart from the west side of Lake George would have required me to stand in somebody's yard to get a then-and-now photo, so we won't be doing that.


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No postmark, but the stamp box dates between 1924 and 1949, and the photo seems to have been taken before the former Hobart House was torn down in 1940.

Radiophone

By the spring of 1922, gramophones were common. The next thing in entertainment was the "radiophone."


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Hobart News 27 Apr. 1922.

KYW was the first radio station in the Chicago area.

The real-estate transaction described below that ad was reported in greater detail by the next day's Gazette.


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"Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 28 Apr. 1922.

"Near the Collver place," was it? Well, the only thing I can identify out of all this is the Collver place as it appeared in 1908:


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From the 1908 Plat Map.

I find a Fred Trapp in Gary in the 1920 Census and the 1930 Census. In neither does he describe himself as a carpenter, but I can't find anyone else by that name.


Anyway, just above that item we see that Calvin C. Shearer had started work on present-day S.R. 51, which had aroused so much interest because of its bad condition.

Over in the "Births" column, a second child for John and Lillian Call, and two Halfman babies — news that only reminds me how little I've kept track of the Halfmans of Ross Township. John and Joe were brothers, I believe: sons of Frank Halfman, and thus brothers also of young Carl Halfman, who had died in an Army camp in 1918. Their grandfather was Henry Halfman, who had arrived in Lake County by April 1860 (when his marriage was recorded), but he did not appear in the census that year. He did, however, show up in the 1870 and subsequent censuses. The 1874 Plat Map shows him owning 80 acres at the northeast corner of Broadway and 61st Ave (the parking lot of Ultra Foods, in other words). Henry and his wife, Mary, had three children: Frank, Clara, and William. We shall have news of William soon.

Joseph Halfman was born circa 1889 and married Marian Adler circa 1912-3. The child born in 1922 was either their third or fourth. As for Joe's younger brother, John, born circa 1893, he had married Clara Adler (Marian's sister) in 1915, and the child born in 1922 was their third, a son named Leo. I can't find the Joseph Halfman family in the 1920 census. The John Halfman family was running a dairy farm on rented land near his Uncle William's farm — possibly his grandfather's old place.


Additional Sources:
♦ 1860 Census.
♦ 1870 Census.
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Mrs. Halfman Dies at Lowell," Hammond Times 4 Apr. 1940. Newspaperarchive.com.

On Sykes Farm

Two copies of the same photo have come down to us via Ida Rossow Hendrix. Handwritten notes on one of them identify the scene as "on Sykes Farm."


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.



We have no date for this photo, nor can I judge by anything in the photo, since I can't really see any fashions, and people around here continued to use horses for transportation into the 1930s and even later.

We know who Herman Rossow was, but Betty Koepke is a mystery to me.

From what we can see of the house in the background, it does look like the house on the Sykes farm we've identified, but as I've mentioned, there were several Sykes farms. However, the Rossows had a connection with the Wm. Sykes farm southwest of Hobart (which sounds like the one we've identified) through Harve F. Carey, who rented and occupied it for several years until the late winter of 1906.* Harve was the son of William H. Carey, the second husband of Augusta Stolp Rossow Carey, mother of Herman Rossow, and Ida Rossow Hendrix.

If the Rossows or the Koepkes (whoever they were) ever had a more direct connection with the Sykes farm, I haven't found out about it yet.

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[9/30/2015 update] Betty Koepke has become just slightly less mysterious since I found this item in the "Local Drifts" of the Hobart Gazette of Jan. 23, 1903: "Miss Bettie Koepke, of Chicago, was a guest last week at the home of Mrs. H. Rossow." I'm guessing that "Mrs. H. Rossow" was Augusta Stolp Rossow, widow of Henry Rossow and soon-to-be second wife of William H. Carey. (In January 1903 Mr. Carey was not yet a widower.) So whoever Betty was, she lived in Chicago and was a friend of the Rossows. She may have been the Bettie Kopke who was recorded in the 1900 Census as a 14-year-old schoolgirl, a daughter of a widowed German immigrant, living on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.

From the "Local Drifts" of the January 9 Gazette:

Wm. Sykes will have his public sale on Thursday of next week Jan. 15th, at his farm about three and a half miles southwest of Hobart, which is now under the management of his brother Henry. It will be one of the largest sales ever conducted in these parts. Besides farming implements, grain, some household furniture and several head of horses he will offer for sale some high grade Polled Durham cattle and many head of swine of the Victoria breed. He will give a credit of one year on all sums over $5.00. L.E. Fehlman will cry the sale.

It appears that Betty Koepke's visit coincided with the public sale on the Sykes farm, which, by the way, "was attended by over 500 people …. The weather was very pleasant and many stock buyers from distant points were present" ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 23 Jan. 1903).

If Herman drove his mother and her friend Betty over to that public sale, and someone happened to take a photo of the two young people with their team and wagon, the only thing I would find surprising is that none of the other 497 people who attended were visible in the background.

Toward the end of January 1903, Harve Carey moved onto the Sykes farm, having leased it for several years ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 30 Jan. 1903).

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[10/23/2015 update] Betty Koepke paid another visit to her friend the following autumn, as reported in the "General News Items" in the Hobart Gazette of Nov. 13, 1903:

Miss Helen and Betty Koepke and Messrs. Lou and Herman Rossow and Wm. Scholtz, of Chicago, visited over Sunday [Nov. 8] at the home of W.H. Carey, near Wheeler.

This provides an even more likely occasion for the photo above to have been taken: it would explain why no one else was visible in the background, and why Betty might be visiting a farm rented by Harve Carey — by then her friend Augusta was Mrs. Wm. Carey, Harve's stepmother. And this time, we know for sure that Herman Rossow was visiting as well.

Along with Betty (the newspaper tells us) came Helen Koepke, which supports the theory that the Bettie Kopke mentioned in my previous update is our girl, since the 1900 Census records that Bettie had a 16-year-old sister named Helene.


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*A son was born to Harve and Kate Carey on that farm in 1903 ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 6 Nov. 1903). An untitled social column in the Hobart Gazette of January 5, 1906, included an item advertising a public sale by H.F. Carey "on the Wm. Sykes farm southwest of Hobart." Late in February, Harve moved to the "Elmer Wolf homestead," which he had purchased, and the Charles Chester family moved to the Sykes farm ("General News Items," Hobart Gazette 2 March 1906).

Update to Reuben Bridle

I came across a death notice that explained why the Bridles' grandson, Clarence Casper, did not appear in the 1910 census — by then the poor child was in his grave.