Bad news and good news

 I mentioned in the previous post that Marion Township had undergone a shocking loss of population from 2010 to 2020. As a result of that post, I was given a link that gives the numbers. First the total populations by township. Hanging Grove, Jordan, and Milroy have very small populations.  Keener is our largest township, followed by Marion.

The next table shows the change from 2010 to 2020. Keener gained over 500 people, but even with the gain, it still lost population in the under 18 category.  But the numbers for Marion are horrific. We lost 12.2% of our population and our under-18s dropped by almost 15%!!! We have a problem.

The housing data suggest that the drop is not caused by a dramatic drop in the number of housing units occupied. Rather it is that the average size of households has dropped. Almost all the new housing in the County is being built in Keener.

The table below shows how we compare to surrounding counties. Tippecanoe and Porter are growing fast. Lake is growing slowly but its under-18 component is crashing. Only Newton and Pulaski are shrinking more than we are. 

These numbers were used to support the case for licensed child care. The argument is that we are not attractive to young families in which both parents work in part because of the lack of child care, especially licensed child care. 

Enough of the bad news. On Friday the County celebrated the 125th anniversary of the Court House. The ceremony was planned to take place on the north side of the Court House, but the cold and threat of rain moved it into the Circuit Court room on the third floor.  After a welcome by Kendell Culp (to the right of the man in red), the master of ceremonies Russ Martin (behind the man holding the American flag) introduced Chris Hasara (in red) who sang the national anthem. The flag was brought in with military precision by officers of the Sheriff's Department and the Rensselaer Police Department. The invocation was given by Pastor John Hill (to the left of Hasara) from the First Church of DeMotte and Wheatfield.

Russ Martin then read a proclamation from the Jasper County Commissioners.

Judy Kanne (in black above) gave a short history of the Jasper County Court House, begining with several buildings that housed court sessions before 1896. Judge Russell Bailey then introduced two previous County judges who have moved to federal judgeships, Michael Kanne of the United States Court of Appeals and James Ahler of the United States Bankruptcy Court of Northern Indiana. Judge Kanne reflected on how it was important that a court room look special, inspiring a sense of awe. In the 1980s and 1990s he served on a federal design group drawing up standards for federal court rooms, and his experience and impressions of the Jasper County Court Room influenced the findings of that group. So it may be that our court room has influenced the design of many other court rooms throughout the United States.

The last bit of ceremony was a presentation by Linda Bushman (in red above) who played the role of Lura Halleck, wife of Abraham Halleck, a prominent lawyer and County official from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. (She also played this role in 2019 at the second annual Weston Cemetery Walk.)

NITCO has been moving its cable TV customers to a new system and I finally got mine installed last week. I regret waiting so long. The old system fed directly from the cable. The new system gets the signal from the home's wifi system, so it is coming with the Internet feed. I had to purchase a new router because my old router was single-band and the new setup requires a double-band router. But with the new system one can pause live TV and continue it (useful when answering a phone call), and one can go back a day or two or three and watch shows from the past. That is useful when there are two shows on at the same time that one wants to watch. 

It has been a very good year for black walnuts. Perhaps you have driven over a few.