Good Old Reliable LaVerne

Since he was mentioned in the brick house article, I just wanted to take a look at LaVerne Manteuffel and the long-time Hobart business he was associated with.


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From Hobart High School's annual, the Aurora, 1922.

LaVerne Paul Manteuffel was born in 1905 in Hobart, to William Paul and Emilie Manteuffel. Emilie was a widow and a business owner when she married Paul (he often went by his middle name) in 1898.

Her first husband, Herman Carl Piske, had been born in Prussia around 1858, and came to the U.S. with his family around 1868. The Piske family shows up in North Township, Lake County, Indiana (probably Tolleston, as we shall see from a later source) in the 1870 Census. By 1880, Herman was on his own, living in a Chicago boarding house and working as a shoemaker (1880 Census).

In September 1880 Herman married Bertha Boldt in Lake County, Indiana. Her family had also immigrated from Prussia and settled in North Township (1870 Census),[1] so perhaps the young people had met each other there.

Around the time of his marriage, Herman opened a shoe store in Hobart, called the "Reliable Boot & Shoe Store." I do not know how much time passed before the word "Old" started appearing before "Reliable."

In 1885 Bertha gave birth to a daughter, Clara. Not long afterward Bertha died. I suppose Herman's relatives stepped up to help him with the baby.

In May 1886, Herman married Emilie Voigt. She, like Herman and his first wife, came from a German immigrant family, possibly also Tolleston residents.[2] Her 1956 obituary (see below) says that she became a Hobart resident in 1884.

Herman and Emilie had two children: Elsa (b. 1888) and Walter (b. 1890). Herman continued operating the boot and shoe store, probably with considerable help from Emilie.

Here is an undated photo of the Piske store.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

Although no one in the photo is identified, I suppose that's Herman and Emilie standing in the doorway.[3] The children may be Clara, Elsa, and Walter. Judging by the cut of Emilie's dress (and, if the little boy is Walter, his apparent age), I would guess the photo was taken around 1893-4.

At that time, I believe the store stood at 313 Main Street, a building known as the Stocker Block.[4]

In 1895, Herman died.


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Hobart Gazette, 18 Oct. 1895.

Emilie took over operating the Old Reliable herself.

In the spring of 1896 came the death of her only son, Walter, as described in this story from the Hobart Gazette of May 22, 1896, titled, "Scarlet Fever."

One day last week Mrs. H.C. Piske's little girls were taken sick and in time it was discovered that they had a light type of scarlet fever. On Friday her little boy about 7 years old was taken with it and became much worse than his sisters. On Monday evening about 8 o'clock the little fellow breathed his last.

Owing to the nature of the disease his body was buried on Tuesday and no funeral services were held except at the house where Rev. Schuelke spoke words of good cheer to the family and friends. His death is extremely sad and our citizens sympathize with the mother in the hours of her bereavement.

On April 1, 1898, as I've mentioned, Emilie married Paul Manteuffel, another German immigrant.[5]

Any attempt to sketch out Paul Manteuffel's history is complicated by the fact that there were two local Paul Manteuffels. They were cousins. Their fathers were brothers, Julius and Louis Manteuffel, who married two sisters, Auguste and Hermine Poppe.[6] Louis and Hermine Manteuffel lived in East Gary (Lake Station), and their Paul — sometimes called "Paul C." or "P.C." — eventually moved to Chicago. In cases where those details are included in a newspaper report about a Paul Manteuffel, I'm able to tell the East Gary/Chicago one from the Hobart one, but they are not always included, so I'm not always sure I'm talking about the right Paul.

As for Hobart's Paul Manteuffel — it appears that he did not join with Emilie in operating the Old Reliable: he had other occupations. In 1897 he had begun operating a saloon in the basement of the Hobart House, and continued in that business for several years.[7] In 1903, we find him filling in for the town's ailing night watchman.[8] Around 1904 he started working at Aetna, possibly at the munitions factory.[9] When the 1910 census was taken in April, Paul was working at a brickyard, but in May he took a position as "night foreman at the [Hobart] water and light plant."[10] By 1920 he was again working at the brickyard, and that is the last information I have about his occupations.

In May 1899, Emilie gave birth to a daughter, Evelyn.

Sometime after the 1900 census, Clara Piske left her stepmother's home. By 1904 she was described as "Miss Clara Piske of Chicago" when she came back to Hobart for a visit.[11] Beyond that, I have not been able to find any information about her.

Late in March 1905, the Manteuffels rented the "Gordon brick": 332-334 Main Street, known to us today as the former location of the Bright Spot restaurant. They moved the Old Reliable into the first floor, while the family occupied living quarters behind the store, and/or upstairs.[12]

In May of that year, Emilie gave birth to a son, LaVerne Paul — her last child.

The 1910 Census shows Emilie operating the shoe store while Paul worked in the brickyard. Elsa Piske, 22 years old, worked as a post-office clerk. In January 1918, Elsa married Allen Mummery (Indiana Marriage Collection). The two of them would be lifelong Hobart residents.

By the 1920 Census, Evelyn Manteuffel, at 20 years of age, was working as a "saleslady" in a "store": I suspect it was her mother's shoe store, as the early 1920s newspapers report several instances of her attending National Shoe Retailers' association conventions in Chicago with her mother.[13] Her brother, LaVerne, upon receiving his high-school diploma in 1922, also made the Old Reliable his full-time job.

Evelyn married Walter Boal in 1926[14] and became a stay-at-home wife.

In 1929, William Paul Manteuffel died — that is to say, there is a stone in Hobart Cemetery with his name and "1929" carved on it. But I have not been able to find a word about his death in the Hobart Gazette, nor can I find his death certificate on Ancestry.com. (I have found a record of a Paul Manteuffel dying in Cook County, Illinois, in April 1929, but the record doesn't include enough information to determine whether it was this Paul.) In the 1930 Census, the enumerator describes Emilie as married, which could simply be an error. The 1940 Census describes her as widowed. A search of Indiana and Illinois newspapers available online doesn't turn up any relevant Manteuffel death notices. I am going to have to do some more reading of microfilm.

Emilie carried on with the Old Reliable business. It earned enough money that in 1936 she was able to buy the building it occupied.[15]

The family suffered a tragedy in 1937, when Evelyn Manteuffel Boal died of cancer just short of her 38th birthday. She had no children.

In July 1939, Emilie sold the Old Reliable business to LaVerne and announced her retirement. The following November, LaVerne married Leotta Flick.


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Hammond Times, 27 Nov. 1939.

Leotta had a lovely singing voice, it seems: she was a church soloist and often sang at weddings, funerals, and other social occasions. In the 1940s she was repeatedly elected director of a local choral club.[16] She and LaVerne had two children: Marvin (b. 1941) and Dorothy (b. 1947).

1956 was the year everything changed. On May 14 Emilie died.


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Hobart Gazette, 17 May 1956.

And in August, LaVerne closed the doors of the Old Reliable Boot & Shoe Store forever.


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Hobart Gazette, 9 Aug. 1956.

I think we can attribute the "81 years" and the "1875" in this article to the mutability of memory and oral history. The writer didn't have the 1880 Chicago census at hand.


LaVerne died in 1983.


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Hobart Gazette, 19 Jan. 1983.

His daughter wrote this touching tribute to him:


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Hobart Gazette, 9 Feb. 1983.

A garden still grows around his former home, 465 East 8th Street, but I don't know if any of it is LaVerne's work.

And if you'd like to learn how to play "the bones," there's a cute tutorial here.

♦    ♦    ♦
In conclusion, I would like to post two ads I found interesting.

The first is from the Hobart Gazette of October 31, 1889:


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Per the old-timers' memories collected in 1979, B.W. Strattan did once operate a "general merchandise store" in the Strattan building. The second door south of that would be on the west side of Main Street. Thus perhaps the Gazette was correct in 1905 when it said that the store had been located on the east side of the street only from around 1894 (see footnote 12). (Also, Herman's initials in this ad are "C.H." instead of "H.C." as in the photograph of the store posted above.)

This ad, from the Gazette of April 7, 1910, is mystifying.


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218 Main is now the Ben Ack Building, but in 1910 only a frame house stood there.

_______________
[1] Her brother, William, married Mary Sullivan.
[2] Both of her parents were born in Germany: John/Johann (b. 1829) and Ernestine/Ernstena (b. 1827). The family came to the U.S. in 1874 or 1875 (as reported by Emilie in the 1910 and 1920 censuses). As of 1896, her parents lived in Tolleston ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 8 May 1896), and they died there within a decade — Ernestine in 1903 and John in 1905). But I have not been able to find them in any census.
[3] I have no idea who the guy lounging under the awning at left is. Note his sleeve protectors, which were often worn by storekeepers, bank tellers, bookkeepers, and even bartenders.
[4] The history of the store's location is a bit confused and has to be inferred from newspaper articles that don't mention addresses, oral histories that don't mention dates, and anonymous handwritten notes on the back of photographs in the Hobart Historical Society files.
[5] He was a son of Julius Manteuffel.
[6] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 2 Feb. 1917.
[7] "Application for License," Hobart Gazette, 5 Feb. 1897; "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 5 Mar. 1897; 1900 Census.
[8] "Local Drifts, Hobart Gazette, 1 May 1903.
[9] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 18 Nov. 1904.
[10] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 6 May 1910.
[11] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 27 May 1904.
[12] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 17 Mar. 1905 and 31 Mar. 1905. The March 17 item mentioned that the shoe store had been in the Stocker Block location (313 Main) for the past eleven years, which would take us back to 1894. If this is not an error, it suggests that the original ca.-1880 store was in yet a different location.
[13] See, e.g., "Local and Personal," Hobart News, 21 Feb. 1921; "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 22 Feb. 1922.
[14] He was a carpenter and helped to build the house at 5501 S. Liverpool Road.
[15] "Hobart," The Hammond Times, 5 Feb. 1936.
[16] "Leota Manteuffel to Direct Choral Club," Hobart Gazette, 27 Sept. 1945.

Four Women, Three Names and a Boujai(WWI-Era Photo Album)

On page 22 of the album, we get an odd juxtaposition of smiling young women, and dead birds.

First, the smiling young women.


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Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Handwritten description behind the first photo:

Anna Hideen
Selma " Larson
Evelyn Manntyffle

Nice, but we don't know which name applies to which young woman, and one apparently hasn't got a name. Though the photo is undated, from the fashions it looks to be from roughly the same time as the dated photos in this album, i.e., 1917-1919.

Anna Hideen was 18 years old in the 1920 Census, her sister, Selma, 16. If Selma went on to marry a Larson, I haven't found out about it yet. Their older brothers, Elmer and Eric, had already left home by then. Their mother, Christine, was widowed, but I don't know how or when.

Evelyn Manteuffel was the daughter of the shoe people, Paul and Emilie Manteuffel. I believe she was the first child of that marriage, but she had two older siblings, Clara and Elsa, from their mother's first marriage, to the Mr. Piske who started the shoe store. (I got the information about the two marriages from here.) Evelyn was 20 years old in the 1920 Census.

Now, let's see some dead birds.



And let's see some creative spelling as well. Handwritten on back of this photo:

Shot with 22 Rifel
May 3 – 1917
In Gruel's New Slauter House Boujai from EJE Tracks

By "Boujai," I suppose he means "bayou." I don't know where the slaughterhouse was. The "Gruel" would probably be Charles Gruel, the butcher, whose biographical sketch you can read in the Lake County Encyclopedia, if you are so inclined.

Death, Expected and Unexpected

The family of the octogenarian Julius Manteuffel had been preparing themselves for his death since mid-April 1922,* but when John Hardesty left home on April 28, heading for the Wheeler saw mill, his wife and children had no idea they would never see him alive again.


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The reports about John Hardesty come through to us a bit garbled, and small wonder, since there were two John Hardestys farming in Union Township, and I can hardly sort them out myself. The one we are concerned with, I believe, was John N. Hardesty, born in 1863 to Harmon and Isabella Hardesty, and now resting in Mosier Cemetery.

This John Hardesty may not in fact have been farming in Union Township at the time of his death; while I can't find him in the 1920 census, a 1920 Gary city directory shows him living on Broadway with his wife, Maud, and working as a teamster. However, he had been farming in Union Township in 1910.

The other, John H. Hardesty, was born circa 1871 to George and Catherine Hardesty. He was still alive and well and farming in Union Township in 1930 and 1940.

The report above attributes six children to John N. Hardesty. I can identify only two from the 1910 census: a daughter, Rebecca, and a son, Russell. There was time enough to produce four more between then and 1922, but still, it's possible that the newspapers were confusing John N. with John H., whose family seems to have been more numerous.

♦    ♦    ♦
In happier news, Dr. Clara Faulkner goes to Crown Point to hear her grandson, Elmer Bullock, sing. She brings Mary Kipp with her, and Mary brings her sister, Mrs. Hatten, and Mrs. Hatten brings her sister-in-law, Mrs. Seider.

__________________________
*His name was mistakenly give as "Louis" in the April reports.


Sources:
♦ 1880 Census.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ 1940 Census.
♦ "Death of Julius Manteuffel." Hobart Gazette 5 May 1922.
♦ Gary Indiana City Directory 1920. R.L. Polk & Co. (Indianapolis), 1920. Ancestry.com.
♦ "John W. Hardesty Accidentally Killed." Hobart Gazette 5 May 1922.

Fred and Olga (Foreman) Rossow

Just recently we encountered this young couple moving onto the Ella Roper farm in Ross Township in 1921. Today let's go back five years and look at their wedding portrait.


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Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.
Photographer: J.J. Naumann, Hobart, Ind.

They were married February 20, 1916, when both were 21 or 22. Olga, whom we've met once before, was the daughter of William and Emma (Manteuffel) Foreman of Hobart; Fred was the son of Theodore and Anna (Bergman) Rossow, whom we've also met.

Here is the Gazette's report of their wedding:


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I am wondering whether the "Burkman" in the article is a mistake for "Bergman" — Olga's mother's maiden name.

Per the 1920 census, Fred and Olga were renting land in Porter County, apparently near the Gottlieb family.


Sources:
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Rossow-Foreman Nuptials." Hobart Gazette 25 Feb. 1916.

The Harper-Carlson-Grabowski-Pike House

I came across this article, in the Hobart Herald of September 9, 1954, summarizing the history of the house at 6430 Grand Boulevard.


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According to the county records (which tend to be imprecise when you get back into the 19th century), the house was built in 1879: a date not inconsistent with this article. I am so curious to know what the author was told that led her to say that the house was built "sometime after 1863" — not that I doubt it; I'm just curious. I'm guessing she talked with old-timers to get this information.

The article doesn't mention William Blumenthal's brief ownership, but of course he was a mere passer-by, wasn't he?

Considering that the Grabowskis' addition to the house was begun in 1923, it's possible the old timers' memories were not serving them well if they thought it hadn't been completed yet by 1930.

The "Verne Manteuff" whose identification of a shoe is said to have been so important after the accident that killed the Grabowskis was LaVerne Manteuffel.

I want to get into more detail about some of the people mentioned in this article, and I will do that in future posts.


By the way, the photo at the top of my second image above doesn't relate to the house, but to a monument I posted about 'way back in 2010, which (according to the program John Dorman had printed up) was erected in 1931.

Olga Foreman

From the Busse autograph collection.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

If these lines are not original, I haven't been able to identify their source, and perhaps the poet's obscurity is well earned, since I'm able to believe that the 14-year-old Olga made this up herself.

She was the daughter of William and Emma Foreman. The 1910 Census found them living on Front Street, sharing a home with Emma's parents, Julius and Augusta Manteuffel.

I believe Olga married Fred Rossow in 1916 (Indiana Marriage Collection) and the 1920 Census shows them running a dairy farm in Porter County, with a baby daughter who was not named after Olga's dead friend.

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Since I can't find a picture of Olga, you'll just have to make do with a picture of her father: William Foreman was a long-serving school engineer — or janitor, as the 1910 censustaker puts it plainly — and so beloved that one of Hobart's elementary schools was named for him after his death. Of course, native Hobartites know the story better than I do. Here he is in the Hobart High School Aurora yearbook of 1927:




And here is the Foreman school — photo undated, but probably near the time of its demolition, since I think that's the newly built Joan Martin school in the background.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Easter Cantata

This public-sale notice has me stumped: I can't find a Doepping farm 3.5 miles southwest of Hobart, and I never heard of Nathan Bosen before.


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Hobart News 13 Apr. 1922.

The 1920 Census shows a Nathan Bosen in Union Twp., Porter County — a Russian immigrant working as a dry cleaner. If he moved into Lake County and changed careers, I didn't hear about it.


Less mysterious is the appearance of two members of the music-loving Harms family as soloists in the cantata performed at Trinity Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday 1922.


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Hobart Gazette 21 Apr. 1922.

I think Henry Harms was Henry Sr. (Henry Jr. was musical, too, but he lived in Chicago and likely had his own church to sing at on Easter Sunday.) Herman, of course, just drove up from the farm east of Ainsworth.

… and then, in the "Local Drifts" column, who should appear but "N. Bosen," presumably Nathan Bosen, who is now renting Elmer Arment's 20 acres and brand-new house on S.R. 51.

I am not sure whether Miss Elizabeth Bruebach was the lovely Liza whose photographs we've seen … but Liza, or Eliza, had been born in April 1890 per the 1900 Census (and her mother, née Elise Manteuffel, had married George Bruebach in 1887 per the Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index).

In the lower right-hand corner of the page above, we find an announcement that a League of Women Voters meeting will be held in Lindborg hall — the dance hall over the blacksmith shop.


Elsewhere in the same issue of the Gazette, we find "Lee & Rhodes announc[ing] that their drinking fountain is now in working order" — that would be the public fountain in front of their shop, I'm guessing, which likely had been shut down for the winter. I have lost track (if I ever knew) where Lee & Rhodes' shop was by 1922.

Scavenger Hunt

Mr. Hallberg says all of these people had photographs taken between December 1921 and March 1922. Some of the photos may have been destroyed one way or another, or passed down with no name written on them so that nobody knows who they are now, but surely some of them still exist and are identified, somewhere. Anybody want to try to track them down?


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Hobart News 30 March 1922.


Names for search-engine purposes: Allen, Batterman, Beach, Billeaux, Black, Bloomquist, Braddock, Brahst, Brand, Brandt, Bruebach, Burnett, Byall, Calvert, Canino, Carlson, Cavender, Condon, Davis, DeFrance, Emery, Faulkner, Finding, Fisher, Fleck, Frageman, Fratzke, Friedrich, Gresser, Grieger, Gruel, Hagberg, Hamann, Hawke, Haxton, Heath, Henderson, Hulett, Ittel, Jahnke, Johnson, Keilman, Kemp, Keppel, Killigrew, Kipp, Koehler, Krull, Lee, Livingston, MacIver, Mackey, MacPherson, Manteuffel, Maybaum, Melin, Mellon, Miller, Mygren, Nelson, Newman, Owen, Pattee, Paxton, Peddicord, Penniman, Peterson, Peterson, Phillips, Pierson, Quinlan, Raschka, Rhodes, Rohwedder, Roper, Rose, Rossow, Scharbach, Scheidt, Schmelter, Shearer, Shoemaker, Shore, Shults, Siegesmund, Sitzenstock, Stocker, Stoeckert, Strom, Strong, Swanson, Thompson, Traeger, Tyler, Vincent, Voorhis, Walters, Weaver, Wheaton, Wild, Wilson, Wood, Wrobbel, Yetter

A Bruebach Family Portrait

I received this photo from a Bruebach descendant, who tells me that it shows a family group on the Bruebach farm circa 1912.


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Photos courtesy of Marilyn Duran.

The extended and in-law Bruebach family at this time included an Abel as well as Manteuffels,[1] and probably other family names that I don't know about.

If this is the Bruebach farm, that must be the farmhouse in the background, and a very nice farmhouse it is. I can't match it up to anything still standing today; more's the pity.[2]

Only four people in this photo are identified, and here Marilyn has pulled them out to form their own little family group:



Clockwise from the top: Frank Abel, Jr. (b. 1880); his wife, Johanna (Bruebach, b. 1882); their son, Lester (b. 1911); and their daughter, Audis (b. 1907).

What strikes me is how unhappy both Frank and Audis look. Maybe they just didn't like having their picture taken; but then again, they might not have felt entirely comfortable among the Bruebachs. Unfortunately, Frank and Johanna's marriage was troubled. Later in the 1910s, their private drama would become public as the social columns of the local newspapers reported separations, reconciliations, and Johanna's filing of a divorce suit. Frank's death certificate (January 1919) describes him as divorced.

By then Johanna had taken the children and moved to Chicago. Marking the anniversaries of Frank's death through 1922, the local newspapers carried notices like this one:


Hobart News, January 22, 1920.


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[1] Elise Manteuffel married George Bruebach, Sr., in 1887 in Chicago (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index), thus beginning what would become the Bruebach family of Hobart.
[2] Assuming some remodeling, it looks a bit like 10 N. Hobart Road, which was built in 1899 per the county records and is not on the former Bruebach property.