Edwardsburg in 1910, through J. Inbody’s camera

Edwardsburg, Mich. About 1910 a photographer came to Edwardsburg and made three views of the village. Each card has its caption printed in white along the bottom, and each ends with the same two words: “Copr., Inbody.” All three are now at the Library of Congress.

Three small photographs: a street of shops, a drugstore beside the post office, a school with a bell tower. They would be pleasant curiosities on their own. But Edwardsburg had a second camera at work in the same years, in the office of its weekly newspaper, and its glass plates survive. Laid side by side, the two sets of pictures put names to the shopkeepers, place the drugstore on its corner and all but settle which school Inbody photographed.

The village in 1910

DocumentedEdwardsburg was old for a Michigan village. The Edwardsburg Chamber’s history says that Ezra Beardsley came west from Ohio and built the first cabin on the south shore of Pleasant Lake in 1826; that the Edwards family arrived in 1828, and the merchant Thomas Edwards, Beardsley’s son-in-law, gave the town its name; and that his brother Alexander laid out the village’s 44 lots, recorded in 1831. The Presbyterian Church marker on Lake Street quotes the missionary Luther Humphrey, who organized that church in 1831, describing the place as “a few log cabins . . . standing amongst the bushes and brush.”

DocumentedBy 1910 the village had been made twice. The Chamber’s history says it was rebuilt after the Peninsular Railroad, later the Grand Trunk, was completed in 1871, and it describes a village of about 500 people with some twenty stores and shops: general, hardware, drug and grocery stores, milliners, furniture and shoe stores, blacksmiths, harness makers, wagon makers, a livery stable, a grist mill and a lumber mill. There were no saloons; the Edwardsburg Reform Club had had taverns outlawed. A weekly paper, the Edwardsburg Argus, had been published since 1875.

ReadingThe Chamber’s history says it was incorporated in 1837 and again in 1912, when it appointed a village marshal. Walter Romig’s Michigan Place Names, as cited on Wikipedia, gives 1911, and the village’s own website says it was “Founded in 1911.” If 1911 or 1912 is right, Inbody’s cards show the village in the year or two before it incorporated. The census of 1920 counted 392 people.

Elkhart St.

DocumentedElkhart St. A row of frame stores with tin awnings. On the left, the window of a shop selling tobacco and cigars; next along, a sign for a MEAT MARKET and another for a BAKERY. A bicycle leans at the edge of the walk, a man stands under an awning, and a horse and wagon wait further down the street.

DocumentedThe Andrus glass plates include a view that reads like a caption to Inbody’s. Photograph 004 in the collection is captioned: “Cass St. looking south from Main St. M. F. Truitt Tobacco and Cigars, J. M. Hicks Meat Market, Tuesley Bakery, Rinehart Grocery, Claire.” Another plate shows “E. S. Claire Tonsorial Parlor (Barber Shop) on Cass St. Burned down,” and the museum in Edwardsburg has a card titled “E.S. Claire Tonsorial Parlor, 1909.”

ReadingA tobacco and cigar shop, then a meat market, then a bakery: the order on Cass Street is the order on Inbody’s card. That suggests the same row of shops, and so the names of the men who kept them about 1910: M. F. Truitt, J. M. Hicks and a Tuesley. The Andrus collection also shows the house of a George Tuesley on US 12, and a barn of a J. H. Hicks dated 1911.

ReadingBut Edwardsburg had an Elkhart Street of its own. The Andrus notes put the Presbyterian Church at “the corner of Elkhart and Lake Streets,” and a house at 69030 Elkhart Street. A close look at the two pictures, sign by sign, should settle it.

The post office and B. C. Fisk

DocumentedPost office. The village post office sits in a low frame building beside a brick corner store whose sign reads “B. C. Fisk, Druggist.” Its awnings advertise ICE CREAM SODA and CIGARS. Three people stand at the post office door, and on the fence to the left are show bills dated the 18th of June. The post office itself was old by then: the Chamber’s history says it was set up on 4 December 1828 as St. Joseph, renamed Edwardsburgh on 1 February 1830, closed for a time, restored on 23 August 1841, and lost its final “h” on a postmaster’s order in 1845.

DocumentedThe Andrus collection places the drugstore. Photograph 149 is captioned “B. C. Fisk Drugstore, corner of Cass and Main Sts., man with oxcart.” Photograph 143, titled “Drugstore & P. O.,” carries the note: “B. C. Fisk Druggist, Drugstore and Post Office which later became a tavern.” A third, photograph 010, looks “west from Cass St.” along Main Street, past the Fisk drugstore, the post office, the Carlisle House, the Schock House and Dan Barber’s store. (The transcription there reads “B. O. Fisk”; the other captions and Inbody’s sign read B. C.) The museum’s own gallery has a card titled “Post Office, Drug Store.”

ReadingSo Inbody stood on Main Street near its corner with Cass, the village’s main crossroads. The note that the building “later became a tavern” is a small irony in a village that had once voted its taverns out.

DocumentedThe post office Inbody photographed had a long history behind it. A post office was set up on 4 December 1828 under the name St. Joseph and renamed Edwardsburgh on 1 February 1830; it closed for a time, was restored on 23 August 1841, and lost the final “h” on a postmaster’s order in 1845. Those dates come from the Chamber’s history.

The public school

ReadingPublic school. A two-story frame school with a pedimented front and a bell tower on the roof, standing in an open yard among young trees. The Chamber’s history says a two-story frame school was built on the north side of Church Street in 1861, and a new brick school on Section Street in 1923. The card is probably the school of 1861, but we have not proved it. Our gallery has a second view of the same building, an Inbody card of 1911.

DocumentedThe Andrus glass plates come close to deciding it. Photograph 005 is captioned: “Schoolhouse in the center of the block, as viewed from the Methodist Church on Church St. Torn down in 1923.” Photograph 147 shows the “Schoolhouse with Methodist and Baptist Churches in background.” The museum also has a card titled “Public School, Edwardsburg, Michigan, 1914.”

ReadingA schoolhouse on Church Street, torn down in the same year that the new brick school opened on Section Street, matches the Chamber’s account of the frame school of 1861. If the building in the Andrus picture is the building on Inbody’s cards, the card shows the school of 1861 in its last years. Comparing the bell tower and the front in the two photographs would make it certain.

DocumentedThe Chamber’s history traces the line of schools. The first opened in 1829 in Thomas Edwards’s home, two more came before 1861, and the two-story building of 1861 had four teachers. The brick school of 1923 opened with eleven teachers and drew in many of the one-room country schools as the Edwardsburg Consolidated School. That building stood at the southwest corner of Section and Main; it was torn down about 2003, when its entrance arch was kept in a small park.

The other camera

DocumentedThe second set of pictures belongs to the Andrus family, who owned and ran the Argus. The collection’s notes say that Henry Andrus, his son George and George’s brother Charles owned and operated the paper for many years, and that George took the photographs on glass plates between about 1900 and 1920. A 2010 column by Jo-Ann Boepple dates his photographs from 1910 to 1920.

DocumentedThe plates were nearly lost. A 2010 report in the Argus by Jessica Sieff says that Charles’s son, Dean Andrus, found the negatives in a storage bin at the old Argus office and scanned them; Boepple counted 339 pictures. Deanna Branson West, the Cass County GenWeb coordinator, put them online, and Mary Montgomery spent more than a year identifying the homes and the people in them. Many are still unnamed.

DocumentedThe captions are a directory of the village. They show the grain mill’s new boiler going in in October 1909; the Grand Trunk depot, “built in 1872, photo in 1914,” with Wilmer Dempsey by an automobile; the Sherman House hotel on Main Street; R. S. Carlisle and Son, hardware and furniture, at Main and Cass; a Ford garage and auto livery on Cass Street; and George and Charles Andrus in the Argus printing office in 1912. Boepple wrote in 2011 that many of the museum’s postcards are believed to have been made by the Andrus family.

ReadingThe difference between the two photographers shows in their pictures. Inbody came from outside, made a few views that would sell as cards and registered them. Andrus lived on Main Street and photographed his neighbors, their porches, their barns and their baseball teams. One set tells us what the village looked like to a visitor; the other tells us who lived there.

Who was J. Inbody?

DocumentedHe was careful about his rights. The Library of Congress records for the three Edwardsburg cards each carry the note “Copyright by Inbody” and a copyright number: J 142861 for Elkhart Street, J 142862 for the post office and J 142864 for the school. They reached the library by transfer from the Copyright Office. Two cards of “French’s Hotel, Eagle Lake, Mich.,” also of 1910, carry the numbers J 143801 and J 144708. His card of a “Hump pusher” on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern at Elkhart, registered on 19 August 1912, is stamped on the back: “Made by J. Inbody, Elkhart, Ind. Home Phone 500.”

DocumentedIndiana collections hold many more. The Indiana Album catalogues his cards under “Inbody, John, 1866-1915,” with the publisher’s line “J. Inbody, Elkhart, Indiana,” among them a view of the island at Lake Wawasee of about 1907 and a street in Wakarusa with people outside the Hotel Misener. A search of its catalogue for his name returns 53 records, from Lake Wawasee and Winona Lake to Goshen College, Bourbon, Milford and Nevada Mills. The Elkhart County Historical Society has a class photograph of Beardsley School pupils of about 1915, printed as a postcard “published by J. Inbody, Elkhart, Indiana.”

ReadingHis timing was good. A 2011 column in the Argus puts the peak years of postcard collecting at about 1907 to 1913, and notes that the Post Office reported 668 million postcards mailed in the year ending 30 June 1908. Inbody’s working years as we know them, about 1907 to 1915, fall squarely in that boom.

ReadingTwo records sit uneasily with the dates on his portrait. The Indiana Album dates a J. Inbody card of Billy Sunday and his family at Winona Lake to 1920, and Indiana Memory dates an Elkhart card credited to John Inbody, “4 Corners Second and High Streets,” to about 1925. Either those dates are wrong, or someone went on using the Inbody name after John died in 1915.

A timeline

• 1826 Ezra Beardsley builds a cabin on Pleasant Lake.
• 1828 The Edwards family arrives; a post office opens on 4 December as St. Joseph.
• 1830 The post office becomes Edwardsburgh on 1 February.
• 15 years later
• 1845 The final “h” is dropped.
• 16 years later
• 1861 A two-story frame school on Church Street.
• 1871 The Peninsular Railroad, later the Grand Trunk, is completed.
• 1875 The Edwardsburg Argus begins.
• 25 years later
• c. 1900 George Andrus begins photographing the village on glass plates.
• 1910 John Inbody copyrights his views of Elkhart Street, the post office and the school, and two of French’s Hotel.
• 1911–1912 Edwardsburg is incorporated as a village (sources differ on the year).
• 1915 John Inbody dies on 10 June.
• 1923 The old school is torn down; the brick school opens on Section Street.

If you go

ReadingEdwardsburg is a public village and its crossroads are still there to walk. The Edwardsburg Area History Museum, at 26818 Main Street, keeps the postcard collections described here; its website gives its season as mid-April to mid-December, Tuesday to Friday from 1 to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with free admission. Check before you travel, as hours change. The State of Michigan marker for the Presbyterian Church stands at 68961 Lake Street; it records the church’s organization in 1831, its first chapel in 1856 and a gift for its renovation in 1923 from Emily Coolidge Chapin of Chicago, a former resident.