A bit further south at the stop light is another large building with Nancy's Mexican Grocery and the Crazy Taco Restaurant. The inscription on the top of the building identifies it as the Fred Thomas Block, 1912.
This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
A visit to Monon
Recently I was in Monon for a meeting. I arrived a bit early, so I walked around the downtown and took pictures.
At the north end of the downtown is their public library. It is a Carnegie Library, constructed in 1914 and renovated in 1993.
I peeked inside. It had a friendly, old-fashion feel to it.
On the other side of the street is the town hall. The old Monon high school has been torn down and is now the site of a gas station and convenience store. The old school building was used for only about thirty years, from 1926 to 1957. I am not sure if the bell was from the school.
A bit further south is a large building the identifies itself as the Horner Block. There is a variety store of some kind in the ground floor with signs mostly in Spanish. In fact, many of the signs in downtown Monon are in Spanish. According the article about Monon in Wikipedia, in 2010 28.4% of the population of 1777 was Hispanic, with almost half of that percentage coming from El Salvador. In 2000 17.25% were Hispanic. (In contrast, in 2010 5.4% of the residents of Rensselaer were Hispanic or Latino.)
Opposite the building above on the east side of the street is the old Monon Theater, which years ago had $1.00 movies. There is a building permit in the window for remodeling. There is a group that would like to restore the building.
A bit further south at the stop light is another large building with Nancy's Mexican Grocery and the Crazy Taco Restaurant. The inscription on the top of the building identifies it as the Fred Thomas Block, 1912.
A bit further south and on the west side of the highway is an old bank building.
It was once the State Bank of Monon.
In the middle of the car lot for Gutwein Motors (Monon has a new car dealership, something Rensselaer no longer has) is a building with a sign for Selz Royal Blue Shoes. I have seen this sign many times and thought that it was for a local shoe store. But above the shoe advertisement is hard to read lettering that I think contains the work "creamery." Searching the Internet for "Selz Royal Blue Shoes" I discovered that signs similar to the one in Monon were once quite common. Some of them have been restored to former glory. The Selz shoe company started in Chicago and by the 1920s had a number of factories in Illinois. It did not do well in the Great Depression and apparently closed in the 1940s. From looking at other signs, my guess is that the company offered to paint the name of the business (in this case some creamery) on the side of the building if it was also allowed to print an advertisement for its shoes. When I spent a couple years in West Virginia, there were many "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" signs and the company got them on barns by offering to paint the barns.
A bit further south at the stop light is another large building with Nancy's Mexican Grocery and the Crazy Taco Restaurant. The inscription on the top of the building identifies it as the Fred Thomas Block, 1912.
Monday, June 13, 2016
An old sawmill
Below is a picture from the book, The Silver Oar and Other Poems by Augustus D. Babcock. You can buy the book on Amazon or you can find it in digital form on the Internet.
The author was born in Jasper County. His father died when he was six and is buried in Crockett Cemetery. After his father's death, the family moved to Rensselaer and then to the Remington area. Augustus ended up in Newton County, and is buried in the Goodland Cemetery. His entry at findagrave.com has an excerpt from A Standard History of Jasper and Newton Counties Indiana (1916) outlining his life. It says he was working on another book, The End of the Trail, a romantic story of the Battle of Tippecanoe, but I can find no evidence that this book was ever published.
Different Babcocks played important roles in the history of Rensselaer. See here, here, and here.
Where was this sawmill located?
The author was born in Jasper County. His father died when he was six and is buried in Crockett Cemetery. After his father's death, the family moved to Rensselaer and then to the Remington area. Augustus ended up in Newton County, and is buried in the Goodland Cemetery. His entry at findagrave.com has an excerpt from A Standard History of Jasper and Newton Counties Indiana (1916) outlining his life. It says he was working on another book, The End of the Trail, a romantic story of the Battle of Tippecanoe, but I can find no evidence that this book was ever published.
Different Babcocks played important roles in the history of Rensselaer. See here, here, and here.
Where was this sawmill located?
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Carpenter bees
Recently I started painting the trim on my garage. As I did, I noticed some large bees hanging around. They are carpenter bees.
I checked the Internet to learn more about them. The male protects the territory but cannot sting. The female can sting but rarely does. The bees are solitary; the female bores round holes in the wood and raises her young. They are beneficial pollinators. Knowing that they were harmless, I did not let them interfere with painting.
They had made a number of holes in a two-by-four that is part of the garage trim. Below you can see two holes that were close enough together to capture in one photo.
The advice for prevention is to paint wood. The bees prefer unpainted wood. They will reuse holes and overwinter in them. The advice on the Internet was to plug the holes in the fall after the young have left and before the bees use the holes for hibernating.
I also had wasps making nests under the eaves. I left them alone and they left me alone. I will have to go back this fall after some hard freezes and knock down the nests and finish paining.
If you have large bees buzzing around your house or garage, they may be carpenter bees. Look for neatly drilled holes about 3/8 inch in diameter.
I checked the Internet to learn more about them. The male protects the territory but cannot sting. The female can sting but rarely does. The bees are solitary; the female bores round holes in the wood and raises her young. They are beneficial pollinators. Knowing that they were harmless, I did not let them interfere with painting.
They had made a number of holes in a two-by-four that is part of the garage trim. Below you can see two holes that were close enough together to capture in one photo.
The advice for prevention is to paint wood. The bees prefer unpainted wood. They will reuse holes and overwinter in them. The advice on the Internet was to plug the holes in the fall after the young have left and before the bees use the holes for hibernating.
I also had wasps making nests under the eaves. I left them alone and they left me alone. I will have to go back this fall after some hard freezes and knock down the nests and finish paining.
If you have large bees buzzing around your house or garage, they may be carpenter bees. Look for neatly drilled holes about 3/8 inch in diameter.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
More meetings 6-6-2016
The main item at the Drainage Board meeting on Monday afternoon was a problem caused by the installation of a fiber optic cable for Franciscan Hospital. In the process of installing the roughly six-mile cable, the contractor damaged about a mile of drainage tile along SR 114. The cable was approved by the commissioners in April with some conditions, but apparently those conditions and the fact that there was a public tile along the route were not communicated to the people installing the cable. The tile no longer is draining water and people affected have more water than they want.
The tile needs to be replaced, but it cannot be put where it is now because there are gas lines and optic cable that are very near it. Moving it will cause problems because there are lateral drains the come into the tile and no one seems to know exactly where those drains connect. The whole matter was pushed to a special meeting for next Tuesday at 9:00 when some of the unanswered questions should have answers.
In items of some interest to Rensselaer, ConAgra is adding parking, but the drainage plan the Board had approved a plan in 2001 that was big enough to handle the current changes. The culvert under Vine Street for the Maxwell ditch (the creek that runs by Brookside Park) is corroding and there have been some small sinkholes in the road. The Board agreed to supply a new culvert but left it to the city to install it.
There were a number of other items on the agenda that were less interesting from the point of view of Rensselaer.
At 4:00 on Monday the Rensselaer City Council had a public hearing that was required by the loan application the City is making to help fund the water main linking the new water well to the city water treatment plant. The public seating was empty and there were no questions from the lone member of the public in attendance. People for KIRPC were there with details. The well and the water main can be justified because cities should have wells in different aquifers and the new well is a over a mile south of the closest well. In addition, if one well is down, the other well should be able to meet the capacity of the the water plant and currently it cannot. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes.
In the evening the Park Board meeting lasted much longer. The transfer of the Staddon Field property is still not complete. There was discussion of where new ball fields should be placed. There is more recognition that the old football field is heavily utilized by soccer players. For many years the area was little used, but the growth of soccer has changed that. As a result, there is now thought that perhaps a better place for new ball field is the large area north of the cemetery and west of the tennis courts that is used only about one day a year. The size of that parcel is much larger than the inside of the running track. There was some sentiment that the old Monnett building in which the meeting was being held should be torn down. It had little use and cost too much to maintain. There was question of whether the park would do better if it was directly incorporated into the city and given a larger budget rather than operating as a quasi-city department aided by a separate park corporation. Not much was decided.
In a week something exciting should be happening on this wall.
The tile needs to be replaced, but it cannot be put where it is now because there are gas lines and optic cable that are very near it. Moving it will cause problems because there are lateral drains the come into the tile and no one seems to know exactly where those drains connect. The whole matter was pushed to a special meeting for next Tuesday at 9:00 when some of the unanswered questions should have answers.
In items of some interest to Rensselaer, ConAgra is adding parking, but the drainage plan the Board had approved a plan in 2001 that was big enough to handle the current changes. The culvert under Vine Street for the Maxwell ditch (the creek that runs by Brookside Park) is corroding and there have been some small sinkholes in the road. The Board agreed to supply a new culvert but left it to the city to install it.
There were a number of other items on the agenda that were less interesting from the point of view of Rensselaer.
At 4:00 on Monday the Rensselaer City Council had a public hearing that was required by the loan application the City is making to help fund the water main linking the new water well to the city water treatment plant. The public seating was empty and there were no questions from the lone member of the public in attendance. People for KIRPC were there with details. The well and the water main can be justified because cities should have wells in different aquifers and the new well is a over a mile south of the closest well. In addition, if one well is down, the other well should be able to meet the capacity of the the water plant and currently it cannot. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes.
In the evening the Park Board meeting lasted much longer. The transfer of the Staddon Field property is still not complete. There was discussion of where new ball fields should be placed. There is more recognition that the old football field is heavily utilized by soccer players. For many years the area was little used, but the growth of soccer has changed that. As a result, there is now thought that perhaps a better place for new ball field is the large area north of the cemetery and west of the tennis courts that is used only about one day a year. The size of that parcel is much larger than the inside of the running track. There was some sentiment that the old Monnett building in which the meeting was being held should be torn down. It had little use and cost too much to maintain. There was question of whether the park would do better if it was directly incorporated into the city and given a larger budget rather than operating as a quasi-city department aided by a separate park corporation. Not much was decided.
In a week something exciting should be happening on this wall.
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Behind the windows--revisited
In October of 2014 I had a post that looked at the renovation of the third floor of the old Oddfellows Building into apartments. In the year and a half since then, the work has been mostly finished. The old post began with an exterior photo, and here is a recent one for comparison.
There are three apartments on the third floor, two in the front and one in the back. The one in the back does not have the wonderful view of the court house, but it does feature a very large main room.
The 2014 post showed doorways to the what would be the kitchen and bathroom. There was nothing in them at the time. Now the kitchen is finished.
Below is the other side. It is small but has everything needed for a kitchen.
On the same side of the room is a bathroom and a closet. The closet has the water heater for the unit.
The front of the building was originally one very large meeting hall. It has been divided into two units that are mirror reflections. The sleeping area is above the bathroom and storage closet. This view is looking at the apartment from the front of the building. This apartment was occupied a few days after this picture was taken. The other apartment that has a similar design has been occupied for some time.
The part of the building the juts out over the sidewalk was originally a stage for the meeting hall. It has been made into a separate room that both apartments share, a common area. It will be a great place from which to watch parades.
In the hallway between all three apartments were some windows that originally were formed at the top of the second floor windows. They will not be used in the remodeled facade but their look will be reproduced. Instead of having leaded panes, the windows will have just one pane and the design of the lead will be simulated with paint. The amount of detail in some of old buildings would be extremely expensive to duplicate today.
Even though comparing these views with those from 2014 shows a lot of change, it does not capture the full scope of the remodeling. There were lots of places where the floor and ceiling had serious issues that needed to be repaired.
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