Willow Leaves July 19

4H’ers Clean Up at Fair Willow Mills 4H’ers were among those who cleaned up at the County Fair Auction in Wabash on Saturday Night. Six area youth who placed high in the fair rankings received a total of over $2,000 for their prizes. While this was not as much as some of the Grand Champions raked in, The kids here are both happy and proud of their accomplishments. A highlight of the auction, Devin Patrick’s Grand Champion crossbred hog brought $2,200 at auction. Devin is a member of the North Manchester 4-H. While not as inflated, Andy Stackhouse’s third prize hog brought $575, which still isn’t bad for a pig with a market value of just under $70. The hog was bought by Hart’s Pure Beef Meat Locker and Stan Hart promises that it will be served for the Labor Day Barbecue at the Holy Waters Baptist Church. Alli Cameron was just as delighted when she was able to sell a barrel of manure from her quarter horse Bars Harley Dean for $150. Sixteen year-old Alli and the buckskin quarter horse turned in the fastest time in the county on barrel-turning and poles to give our young horsewoman her third straight championship. Said Alli, “There’s plenty more where that came from!” We assume she meant both championships and manure. At the bottom end of the scale, Billy Peoples sold his Blackself Guinea Pig to State Senator Jim Erwin for a whopping $50. The black Cavy won best of show. When asked his plans for the guinea pig, Senator Erwin said, “It’s too small to eat, so I guess I’ll take it to Indianapolis and see if I can get it elected Governor.” Congratulations to all our 4-H Club members and to the great showing they made in Wabash.

Crop Report Looks Good Wabash County farmers are expecting good yields from both sweet and field corn this year, thanks to ideal growing conditions. A wet spring followed by hot humid weather this summer has sent corn skyward. Several farms in the community are offering choice ears of young sweetcorn. When asked the best way to prepare sweetcorn, Amos Alger, a principal grower east of town, said “Bring a pot of boiling water to the field. Pick the corn you want and husk it on the way to the pot. Dip it in the boiling water for eight minutes, then roll it in our blended salt, pepper, and sweet cream butter. Eat as many as you dare.” If you’d like to try corn cooked this way, Amos is once again maintaining a kettle of boiling water at the field-side vegetable stand, and he guarantees the results.

Getting it on Ice

Charles Allen Hart knew refrigeration like few men of his era. His family moved down to Indiana from Ontario in the late 1800s and looked for a place where Charles’ father, Norman, could ply his trade. He was an iceman. And he raised his son to be an iceman as well. When they moved to Willow Mills, they built an icehouse near the mill on the north side of the river and all winter long he and his son cut blocks of ice out of the mill-pond and stored them in the icehouse. In the summer, he and his son loaded a wagon each morning and carted ice into town for the people with iceboxes to keep their food cool. Of course big operations like the dairy had their own ice cutting crews because milk would go bad pretty quickly in Indiana’s hot summer if you didn’t get it cooled.

Norman was a man of foresight and was keen on technological advances in the art of refrigeration. When he built his icehouse, he used the best technology he could afford: smooth sheets of zinc lining a larger chamber where ice was packed in salt and wrapped in long strips of flannel. The icehouse hand an earthworks berm that made it look almost like an Indian burial mound from a distance. Charles was responsible for draining melted water and filtering out the salt so it wouldn’t contaminate the ground water around the icehouse.

Charles anticipated that he would spend his entire life cutting ice and hauling it through the streets of Willow Mills. But after the warm winters and scarcity of ice in 1889 and 1890, Norman installed a compressor. So in addition to selling the ice, collecting the money and keeping the cash account correct, Charles had to take care of the compressor. He adjusted the packing gland, adjusted the hand expansion valve and drained the oil trap. He was becoming more of a mechanic each day.

In 1911, the 30-year-old Charles went with his father on an excursion to Fort Wayne where they saw General Electric’s first refrigerator, invented by a French Monk. They could see the writing on the wall. Just as people currently had ice boxes and anxiously awaited the delivery each week of their ice, soon people would have refrigerators. The world was going to change. It was time for Charles to begin changing the business. So, with his own two young sons in 1915, Charles bought the old butcher shop and purchased half of the Main Street block north of the town square on which it sat. There he built a new refrigeration house. The family continued to cut ice and store it in the old icehouse. But the new refrigeration house on Main Street kept not just ice available, but offered lockers for customers to keep their meats cold, butchered meats for the local farmers, and packaged and sold meat that they stored in the “Meat Locker.”

When Nathan and Samuel Hart grew up, they were naturally a part of the family business, well-trained butchers and icemen like their father and grandfather. But where Samuel was as happy cutting meat as he was cutting ice, Nathan was a bit of an odd duck. Like the prodigal son of old, he asked for his share of the inheritance early on and his dad and brother bought him out of the business. Had Charles known what his son was about to do, he might not have agreed to the arrangement.

Far from leaving home and squandering his inheritance, Nathan turned around and bought the Grissom house, a big brick mansion across the street from the meat locker that Randall Grissom built just the year before the old mill burned down. The place had pretty much been derelict for 30 years with a variety of businesses and families moving in and out of them. It had a doctor’s office in it before Nathan bought it, but Willow Mills just wasn’t big enough to support a doctor of its own and Doc Wilson moved to Wabash.

But the old mansion was perfectly suited to Nathan Hart’s purposes. He had studied refrigeration pretty well and back in the late 1870s, an African American by the name of Thomas Elkins had patented an improved refrigerator design. The improved refrigerator, however, was designed to chill human corpses to preserve them before burial. Nathan did a little improvement on the old designs and started importing coffins and headstones. He opened Hart’s Funeral Home right across the street from Hart’s Pure Beef Meat Locker, both to the surprise and chagrin of his brother and father.

So that’s how it came about that when you drive down Main Street from the north, you see these two family-owned businesses across the street from each other in a bizarre juxtaposition that is not devoid of humor after you get over the initial shock. Just don’t turn into the wrong drive when you are headed for Hart’s.