Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on March 6, 1976.
Museum Curator’s Grandma Early Jail ‘Prisoner’
Proprietor Of The ‘Community Attic’ Finds Local Roots Helpful In Work
By MARY HENRICHS
AS MRS. TREVOR STALBAUM works among exhibits at the Porter County Historical Museum, she laughingly comments that she is now curator of an area where her Grandmother Elma (Skinner) Bull was once locked in a jail cell.
Mrs. Skinner used to tell her granddaughter about having been playfully locked in a cell of the Porter County jail when it was being built in 1871 and she was 11 years old. The “jailers” were construction workers who were relatives of a school chum with whom she’d gone to inspect the building project.
The maternal side of Mrs. Stalbaum’s heritage stems from the Bull family which settled in Rolling Prairie in the 1840s and she finds, “having roots in the community saves lots of leg work and searching in books” because she often knows the people about whom she gets requests for historical information.
The curator noted that because many Americans are currently working on genealogy, she often receives letters from distant places asking for material on Porter County ancestors.
MRS. STALBAUM also said that many items with some historic relationship to this area have been given to the museum by people living elsewhere. For example, an Illinois woman in her 80s who was the granddaughter of Army Capt. John Louderback, a Porter County Civil War leader imprisoned with his men at Andersonville, sent the museum a plate which Louderback had brought home from that notorious prison.
A Hobart resident gave the museum a book of photographs, taken about 1920 of people who lived in the Cooks Corners neighborhood. In it, Mrs. Staulbaum found a picture of her paternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Wohlenberg, which she had never seen before.
“Sometimes a museum is like a community atticーa hodgepodgeーbut we have a good variety of items,” the curator noted proudly as she pointed out that the Historical Society still has several objects from its original 1916 display, including a melodian and a brass clock.
Nearly everything in the museum collection has been donated and many of the exhibits loaned for the 1916 Centennial program at the Valparaiso Public Library were reclaimed by their owners.
THE PORTER COUNTY Historical Society was founded in 1916 with the goal of “collection and preservation of all records and materials calculated to shed light upon the natural, civil and political history of Porter County and surrounding country, the marking of historical places…,” according to a history of the organization written in 1966 by the late Mrs. Alfred R. Putnam, former Society president.
In 1918, the Society purchased some articles of historical interest from the Joseph Bailly Homestead then being sold by Bailly’s granddaughter, Francis Howe. That same year, the Valparaiso Library Board gave the Society permanent display space in what is now the library’s genealogy room. Shortly thereafter the DAR assumed responsibility for operating the museum which it continued to do until re-incorporation of the Historical Society in 1948. In the meantime, the museum had been moved in 1937 to the fourth floor of the newly-rebuilt Porter County Courthouse where it remained until opening in its present location in September, 1974.
“This is the first and only museum I ever moved, and I don’t want to move any more,” laughed Mrs. Stalbaum, who recalled that many items were carried from the courthouse to the old jail by the Stalbaum family’s tractor and hay wagon. Two trucks and three men from Landgrebe Motor Transport, Inc., needed three days to move the rest.
Mrs. Stalbaum became interested in the museum when she joined the DAR and she recalls that Mrs. WIlliam Johnston and Mrs. Fred Bartz were then donating their time to keep it openーat first, by appointment and, later, on Fridays every week.
IN 1963 the Porter County Council approved a $4,500 budget for the museum and the Commissioners used some of those funds to hire Mrs. Irving Bundy as part-time curator in 1964.
Mrs. Stalbaum soon began assisting Mrs. Bundy and, “Although she had lived in Illinois and Missouri before coming here, we discovered we had two common ancestors ‘way back.”
Mrs. Stalbaum succeeded to the curator’s post after Mrs. Bundy retired in December, 1966.
“Porter County can be thankful that people are interested enough in the museum to donate articles to ot and that the Commissioners are helpful,” commented Mrs. Stalbaum as she displayed a letter from Marion Isaacs, former Porter County Historical Society president and current resident of Florida: “After touring other parts of our country, I believe we are the most blessed society of any to have our county government behind us. Down here the society is trying everything they can to do to preserve an old house and just can’t get enough money.”
