Nov. 26, 1930: CITY TO MARK ANNUAL FEAST DAY QUIETLY

Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on November 26, 1930.

CITY TO MARK ANNUAL FEAST DAY QUIETLY

Family Reunions, Church Services, School Holidays and Benefit Football Game Are Features.

CITY BAND GIVES A BIG BENEFIT DANCE

(BY ENGLEBERT ZIMMERMAN)

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving day and Valparaiso and environs in conjunction with the rest of the United States, are arranging to give this oldest of American holidays fitting observances.

Pre-eminently Thanksgiving is America’s great day of family reunions and feasting. On no other day in all the year is there so much returning back to the family hearth, for renewal of family ties around about a beautifully provided board.

That is what Thanksgiving is, in the main in Valparaisoーa day of reunions and feastings. That is what it has been as long as most of the populace can recall.

Business generally will be suspended this evening, not to be resumed on any grand scale until Friday morning. A covering of snow blankets the entire section.

Dealers report that orders for turkey have been unusually large this year, due to the reasonable prices prevailing. Dealers also report heavy sales in ducks, geese, chickens and cuts of beef and pork.

City schools will enjoy a two-day holiday, closing this afternoon and not reopening until Monday, according to an announcement made by Roy B. Julian, superintendent. The double holiday will permit teachers to return to their homes for at least three and in some cases four day visits with relatives and friends. The local schools, Superintendent Julian pointed out, observe few holidays, but Thanksgiving is one of them.

Valparaiso university also marks the holiday with a break of schedules.

Religious services perpetuating the early festival established by the Pilgrim Fathers will be observed in a number of churches tomorrow morning.

Congregations of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Christian church will participate in a joint union service to be held at the Christian church at 9:30 a.m., Rev. Frank Roy Briggs, of the Methodist church, will preach the sermon.

The Immanuel Lutheran church will hold special services at its edifice on North Washington street tomorrow at 10 a.m. Rev. George Schutes will preach the sermon.

A Thanksgiving service will be held by First Church of Christ Scientist, at 121 Lincoln Way, at 10:45 a.m. tomorrow.

Thanksgiving cheer will be spread for inmates of county jail and county infirmary. Sheriff Burney Maxwell and Superintendent W.H. Dittman have arranged persons under their charge.

Tomorrow afternoon at Brown Field, the Valparaiso university football team will meet a team composed of alumni in a big benefit game for the community chest fund. The game will start promptly at 2 o’clock.

Tomorrow night at Elks’ temple ball room, the Valparaiso city band will give a dance, the proceeds of which will go to the band in making up a deficit during the summer concert season.

Nov. 23, 1935: Porter County Once Was Site of Thriving Cheese Plant; Pioneer Ell Pinney Relates Is History

Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on November 23, 1935.

Porter County Once Was Site of Thriving Cheese Plant; Pioneer Ell Pinney Relates Is History

(BY ROBERT ALLETT)

Few people living today can remember when east Porter county was the center of a thriving cheese industry that annually converted thousands of pounds of milk from herds in that vicinity into a delicacy that served the middle west.

Located on Crooked Creek on Snake Island, one and a half miles north of where State Road 30 now runs, and slightly to the northwest of Wanatah, the “cheese factory” is an institution long since forgotten even by Porter county’s oldest residents. No written record of the business is available, and no landmark remains to designate the exact spot where the factory stood. A wealthy landholder named Ruell Starr owned Snake Island and Joe Cromer was the manager of the establishment which was at least partly controlled by James McGill. Beyond that, names of men who ran the establishment have faded from memory of Porter county’s earlier historians.

Ell Pinney yesterday recalled the time when he, accompanied by his father, Horace Pinney, and his brothers, Kay and Jay, whose names, Mr. Pinney explained smiling, were the result of a large family in which there “were so many children we had to use the alphabet to name them.” made daily trips to the cheese factory to dispose of their milk. This was at least ten years before the death of the elder Pinney which occurred in 1880.

“Sixty-five years is a long time for a man to remember names of people he wasn’t interested in,” said Mr. Pinney when asked about the men who ran the cheese concern. Mrs. Oresta Freer, a neighbor, supplied much of the information obtained. Mrs. Freer, not as old as Mr. Pinney, held faint recollections of the old timers and their activities. In her youth Mrs. Freer taught in a one-room school near here and remembers Dr. G.H. Stoner as “a bright little shaver.”

It was agreed by Mrs. Freer and Mr. Pinney that the cheese factory was built on the site of a mill race which had been installed by Mr. Starr but never used. No one knows just what became of the factory, but it is believed that when Harry Dolson started a similar business at Wanatah in about 1875 he took over the Crooked Creek concern. This venture lasted only a few years, however, and cheese making in Porter county was a thing of the past. Individual farmers turned their milk into butter, selling large quantities to the Chicago area.

Mrs. Freer told of hearing her father, Elias Sherman, one of the county’s earliest known settlers, speak of buying cattle at the Crooked Creek center which was evidently used as a sort of livestock trading post.

Mr. Pinney, interested in the coming Centennial celebration next year, remarked that one of the stories his father, who settled here just 100 years ago, told was of meeting a band of Indians being driven west as he was returning to his farm from a trip to Valparaiso. Swamps and underbrush made the journey to the county seat an affair of major proportions in those days.

An interesting sidelight into the first years of Valparaiso university was given by Mr. Pinney who attended the Valparaiso university was given by Mr. Pinney who attended the Valparaiso Normal School under Brown and Kinsey in 1878. Unlike the system today under which text books in all schools are changed almost annually, Mr. Pinney remembers that at that time one used any volume he could lay his hands on and it was a rare occurrence when two students in a class possessed the same text by the same author.

Asked how Thanksgiving was celebrated in those days, Mr. Pinney replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Same as we do knowーate all we could!”

Nov. 20, 1940: Turkey Dinner To Cost About Same As In 1939

Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on November 20, 1940.

Turkey Dinner To Cost About Same As In 1939

BY UNITED PRESS

John Q. Public, the average American citizen who is the head of a family of four, will pay about $4.32 for his Thanksgiving dinner if he lives in one of the 32 states where the holiday will be celebrated tomorrow, a United Press survey showed.

The average price for the meal in 1939 was $4.46.

As in 1939, there are again two schools of thought on the celebration of the annual feast day. Governors of 16 states clung to the traditional last Thursday of the month, the others abided by the proclamation of President Roosevelt which for the second successive year moved the holiday up one week.

If Mr. Public lives in one of the states where tomorrow will be Thanksgiving, he can travel next week to Maine, New Hampshire Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Nevada or Idaho and have another feast. Those are the states which retained the traditional date. Kentucky will celebrate both days.

The average market basket which Mrs. John Q. Public carried after she had gone shopping for the family’s dinner contained an eight-pound turkey costing $2.26; one bunch of celery worth nine cents; a large jar of olives which cost 30 cents; four pounds of sweet potatoes, 18 cents; one-fourth peck white potatoes, eight cents; one pound of mince meat for a pie, 21 cents; four pounds of squash, 14 cents; two pounds of cranberry for sauce, 58 cents; two pounds of pumpkin for another pie, 22 cents and five pounds of apples for stuffing and baking, 27 cents.

Turkey prices generally were lower this year despite heavy losses in flocks during the severe cold weather recently. At New York, where the traditional bird cost 37 to 39 cents last year, the price was down to 29 to 31 cents per pound in 1940. In San Francisco the prices were 16 to 27 cents this year compared with 27 to 31 in 1939. But in Minneapolis, Minn., where turkey farmers suffered some of the most extensive losses, the price was up three cents per pound over the 1939 price of 30 cents.

At Omaha, Neb., provisioners reported the price of an average turkey was 28¼ cents compared with an average of 30 cents last year, all other staples for the meal were at approximately the same levels as last year except cranberries which were ip one to five cents depending upon the proximity to markets and pumpkin which was down slightly in most localities, seldom more than one cent.

The survey determined the cost of the meal only on the basis of the ordinary menu composed of the foods contained in the basket Mrs. Public brought home from the market. The “fixin’s” which may be added to this basic meal would increase the cost in proportion to the amounts considered necessary to make the meal complete.

However, some provisioners recommended that six cents be added to the total cost of even the basic mealーthe average price of a box of bicarbonate of soda.