Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Bear's Head Tooth

Found this mushroom (about 4" wide) on a felled deciduous tree in Deep River County Park. It doesn't look exactly like a Bear's Head Tooth, but it looks even less like anything else. It's been through a few freeze-and-thaw cycles already, which may have affected its appearance.

View from the side:


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From the bottom:




None of the other pictures I took came out.

Hard Times at the Brickyard

The Kulage Brick Works had gone through some kind of slowdown, if not shutdown, in the summer of 1921; now, in September, the brickyard is shutting down "indefinitely," throwing forty men out of work.


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Hobart News 15 Sept. 1921.

Whoever, in the midst of these hard times, could afford a car would soon have some improved Lincoln Highway mileage to drive it on.

Third-Grade Composition Book, 1905-06

Way down in the steamer trunk I came across little Minnie Rossow's third-grade composition book (from the school year of the report card we just saw). And it's just too cute!


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.


I am not sure how the contents of the book came to be written — that is, were they a retelling of her lessons? copied from dictation? original, maybe? — some read as if they could be. There is a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Wind"); another about birds whose author I can't find, but it seems beyond what an eight-year-old could compose.


Here Minnie retells a fable of Aesop:





I believe she cut the silhouettes out of colored paper and pasted them in the book.


Here she pretends to write a letter to a friend (I don't know if she really had a friend named Paula).



In the letter she mentions playing Fox and Geese at the noon recess; elsewhere she explains the rules of that game:




This is a version of an old fable … but can you image a third-grader today hearing such a story in school?




Minnie shared a birthday with George Washington. Now, we've all heard the cherry-tree story, but have you ever heard the colt-bursting-a-blood-vessel story?




… Those are just some of my favorite pages. Here is a PDF of the whole composition book:

Third Grade Composition Book 1905-6

Bobbed Hair in Middletown!

Was it newsworthy when three girls in Muncie bobbed their hair??


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Hobart Gazette 16 Sept. 1921.

Elsewhere on that same page — aside from the sixth wedding anniversary of George and Pearl Yager — we find a mention of a young man named Lee Thompson. I don't believe I've taken notice of this particular Thompson family before. Lee's parents were George and Nancy Thompson, who had moved with their son and three daughters into Ross Township from Porter County, sometime between 1910 and 1920. I can't really tell from the 1920 census where in Ross Township they were living; I have been told that at some point they occupied the white house on the north side of Ainsworth Road just west of County Line Road, and the News also describes Lee as an Ainsworth resident.

I don't believe these Thompsons were any relation to the five-and-ten-cent Thompsons. I am not sure if they had any relation to the 19th-century Ainsworth Thompsons. However, George was a brother of the Wallace Thompson whose daughter, Ethel, had been killed by a train in Wheeler in 1919.

There's nothing particularly interesting about Lee's visiting his uncle, but we shall be hearing more from this family as the years go by.

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Little tidbits about some people we've known for a long time …


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Hobart News 15 Sept. 1921.

Lovisa Nelson and her children had probably been visiting her sister, Luella Olson, in Fort Wayne. And Alice Paine, recently graduated from Hobart High School, is off to Teachers College in Indianapolis, which I never heard of before.


Additional Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 15 Sept. 1921.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.

This little cutie was Lila Bailey and she was in the first grade, according to handwritten notes on the back of the photo.


I am thankful for people who save old photos, and for people who share them. And for people who write helpful information on the back!

Minnie and Miss Fleck

Here is little Minnie Rossow's third-grade report card, from the 1905-06 school year:


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Images above and immediately below courtesy of Eldon Harms.

On the back, William Rossow duly signed his daughter's report card every month.




Minnie's teacher was Anne Fleck. We have her portrait from 1907, as a member of the Old Maids' Basket Ball Team:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Anne (or Anna) was born in 1885, so she was about 20 years old when she taught Minnie. Per the Indiana Marriage Collection, in 1916 she married Alfred G. Ingram (the same year her brother, John, married Daisy Raschka). Sadly, it seems that Anne Fleck Ingram died in her thirties. She rests in Crown Hill Cemetery.

A Six-Room Bungalow

The first I ever heard of the "E.L. Arment 20 acres" was in March 1918, when Charles Sapper and his son, John, rented that land for some unnamed purpose, probably agricultural. The land lay on the east side of present-day Grand Boulevard, south of the Bracken land that is now Barrington Ridge, north of the Dorman land that is now the Indian Ridge golf course. The 1908 Plat Map ascribes it to "E.L. Armett":


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I do not know when E.L. Arment purchased these 20 acres. The 1891 Plat Book has Annie Ford written in as the owner, over a crossed-out "A.R. Castle." If we go back to the 1874 Plat Map, we find another Castle owning the land.

Anyway, now — at September 1921 — comes the announcement that E.L. Arment intends to construct a six-room bungalow on his 20 acres, and has given Frank MacPherson the contract to build it.

I am having some trouble positively identifying Mr. Arment. I suspect he may have been Elmer Livingstone Arment, who in November 1900 had married Maud Rifenburg of Hobart. Elmer had worked as a guard at the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City from 1900 (or earlier) on through the first World War, but by 1920 he had gone to work at a steel mill in Gary. It appears he managed to get himself counted twice in the census — once at home in Michigan City, where Maud naturally enough gave his name to the census enumerator as the head of the household; and on the same day in Gary, where he was listed as a lodger in a steelworker's home.

The six-room bungalow may have been intended as a new home for his family, but I have yet to confirm that they ever lived in it. Or even that it was ever actually built, much less still standing.

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One report on the Arment land described it as "opposite the Richard Carlson fruit farm." As you can see from the image above, opposite the Arment place is the 80-acre farm that once belonged to Swan Peter and Hedvig Carlson. We know that 20 acres of that parcel were sold in 1919 by a daughter of the Carlsons, at which time I wasn't sure what had become of the other 60 acres. Per the 1910 census, among the Carlson children was a son named Richard, who would have been about 35 years old in 1921; perhaps he owned another parcel carved out from the original 80 acres, and used that land to raise fruit (although no census describes him as a farmer). If that's the case, it suggests the old homestead was divided up among the survivors after S.P.'s death. (The 1926 Plat Book shows that land in several small parcels — too small to show the owners' names — while one of the small parcels was owned by a Carlson per the 1939 Plat Book.)


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 8 Sept. 1921.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 29 Mar. 1918; 9 Sept. 1921; 16 Sept. 1921.
♦ WWI Draft Cards.