Railroad Maintenance Equipment: Track Sections and Crane Thingy

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From time to time weird and interesting machines will parade by on the railroad. This is one of the less bizarre. He's carrying preassembled sections of track.

The Bootlegger and the Nosy Neighbor

From the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger of Wednesday, September 7, 1927:

Liquor violators fared ill in local courts Tuesday.

*   *   * John Chester, owner and operator of a lunch stand on Lincoln Highway,† near Deep River, was arrested Monday by Deputy Sheriff Thomas Platt, of Crown Point, on a warrant charging him with violating the state liquor law. The warrant on which Chester was arrested was signed by a neighbor. He was released on $1,000 bond.

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†This is probably part of what later became known as Chester's Camp.

Source:
♦ "Kouts Booze Sellers Get Stiff Fines." Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.) 27 Sept. 1927. Access Newspaper Archive. Lake County Public Library. 3 Nov. 2009.


Can't a man do a little bootlegging in peace?

I find John Chester's character intriguing. Indeed, all of these people I've been researching intrigue me, probably more so because I can get only stray, disjointed bits of information about them, just the right foundation for building rampant speculation.

And I must say, conjecture is fun.

The excerpt above shows us that John Chester wasn't above violating the law — but then again, he had plenty of company during Prohibition. I could find only this one article on the topic, so probably he was just a casual law-breaker.

From the information in my earlier post about his bereavements and his suicide, we can leap to a couple conclusions:
♦ Since he was an entrepreneur, first operating Chester's Camp on the Lincoln Highway, then moving on to open another tourist camp on U.S. 12, he must have had some degree of business acumen and initiative, and to operate a business involving so much customer interaction he probably had a gregarious personality (unless he was a Basil Fawlty type).
♦ He seems to have had a deeply emotional side. The gravestone that he chose for his first wife in 1935 emphasizes their relationship and gives the exact dates of her birth and death, which I (untrained in psychology) interpret as a sign of emotional attachment. He was only 47 when he was widowed, and had at least one child still at home; in such cases remarriage might be a matter of convenience as much as anything else, but he formed such a deep attachment to his second wife that upon her death he was distraught and spoke to friends of wanting to kill himself — and finally did so, though it meant abandoning his youngest child, a schoolgirl of 13. We could possibly construe his suicide as the result of some mental illness such as depression, but that's really wild speculation, entirely without evidence.

And thus ends my conjecture for today.

Grand Trunk Western Railroad Employees Timetable 1971

Gee, guys, nice of you to mention Ainsworth. And you even mentioned that telephone on the pole at Ainsworth. What? — the siding? — oh, please don't trouble yourself to mention that.

Another day, another document-sharing site. I'd have stuck with scribd.com forever if only it weren't so temperamental about uploading documents.

Orderly Geese of Ainsworth

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They just need a little more drilling, they're not holding their ranks as well as they could.

These Canada geese are resting at Shilo Lake.←That's my cute way of saying the middle of the pasture at Shilo Ranch floods whenever we have heavy rains. The land forms a natural trough and with the slow-draining clay soil around here, the flooding can linger for weeks, although it diminishes from lake to pond, then to puddle, then to mud. Then another heavy rain. Must have been inconvenient for the people who actually farmed that land. What do I know, maybe they just pastured cows there. There are still remnants of old wooden posts and wire-mesh fence in spots along the modern steel-bar fence (I just made up that term, no idea what it's really called).

Chester Cemetery, second draft

Chester Cemetery Draft 10-30-09

Having searched through the census, birth, death, marriage, draft and Civil War pension records available through Ancestry.com, I have been able to fill out a little more information on who these people were.

When I have rested my brain a bit, I will have to try the newspaper database again. But when you're talking 1850s and 1860s and a sparse population, you're not going to find anything in the newspaper database. People were born, married and died with little record beyond the census. Children who were born and died within the decade between censuses escaped all official notice.

Some of these names are included because they were on the list at the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society website, but I couldn't find the corresponding stone and so there are no birth and death dates. I will have to go back and make a better record of which stones I couldn't find. Sometimes I found the stone, but the birth and death dates were illegible, and the censuses couldn't help.

I'm surprised by how thoroughly Frank L. Booty evaded notice from everyone except the draft board, and the newspapers when he came to his remarkable end.

Amber Waves of Soy

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Actually they weren't doing a lot of waving on this still, damp day.

The weather has been rainy for days now. Coming in from outside, I track in mud and dead leaves into the house. I can only imagine what it was like before there were paved roads, paved driveways, paved front walks.

All these hours spent in front of the computer have made my right elbow so sore that I've had to switch the mouse over to my left hand. Awkward.

Hobart Then and Now: Sixth and Main

Here is the northwest corner of Sixth and Main Streets, in 1962 and 2009.



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The gas station was set further back from the street than the Dairy Queen is now (see this aerial view of uncertain date reprinted in a booklet called "A Short History of Hobart").

♦    ♦    ♦
I'm updating the Chester Cemetery list by combing through the census and other records on Ancestry.com for more information about the people buried there. It's a slow and laborious process. Interesting how the census-takers seem to have spelled people's name by ear sometimes, so "Nolte" may become "Noltie" and "Sievert," "Seveart" — which, although it may confuse the researcher, also gives an impression of how the family pronounced their name at the time.

Sources:
♦ Hobart High School Memories Yearbook, 1962.
♦ Pleak, Mariam J., et al. "A Short History of Hobart." Hobart: The Hobart Gazette Publishing Co., Inc., n.d.