A Picture for Presidents Day

February is the month of presidents, and for February and for our presidents, I would like to offer a piece of artwork by an Indiana artist. His name was Jim Baker, and like Abraham Lincoln, he was born in Kentucky and came to Indiana in his youth. In this case, James Wallace Baker was born on June 24, 1924, in Owensboro, Kentucky, right across the river from the Hoosier State. He graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and from 1946 to 1996 worked for the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio. Jim Baker was a draftsman and historical illustrator of surpassing ability. He wrote and illustrated about a dozen small books on Ohio and American history. He was also creator of the historical comic strip Ben Hardy, which was known by various names and published from 1952 to 1965 and 1975 to 1979. The illustration below is of the homes and monuments of Ohio presidents, drawn for a portfolio called Portraits of Ohio Presidents, published by the Ohio Historical Society in 1968. Jim Baker died on December 29, 1995, in Columbus, Ohio, at age seventy-one.

Happy Presidents Day!
February 20, 2017

Text copyright 2017, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Corydon Capitol by Mac Heaton

We're now six months away from the beginning of Indiana's bicentennial year. Although Indiana did not become a state until December 11, 1816, the celebrations and observances have already begun and will only accelerate when 2016 arrives.

From June 10 to June 29, 1816, forty-three delegates met in Corydon, Indiana, to draw up a constitution for what would become the nation's nineteenth state. The Harrison County courthouse--the building that would become the new state's first capitol building--had not yet been completed. Tradition holds that the delegates held their sessions under a large, spreading elm tree instead. That tree succumbed to Dutch elm disease in 1925, but the trunk of the Constitution Elm remains protected by a sandstone monument in Corydon.

The Corydon capitol building has fared better and is now an Indiana State Museum Historic Site. In 1970, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources issued a booklet called The Corydon Capitol State Memorial. The cover artist was Malcolm "Mac" Heaton (1925-2002), staff artist for and art director of the DNR, earlier the Department of Conservation. His design appears in the image above.

There are many bicentennial dates to come. The bicentennial of the first Indiana constitutional convention is among the first of real significance. So Happy 199th Birthday to Indiana's first constitution!

Caption copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Dale Van Pelt (1872-1950)

Dale Van Pelt must have had an interesting career, yet I have found out only a little about him. He was born on July 30, 1872, in Moorefield, Indiana, located not far north of Vevay, the seat of Switzerland County. His birth may have coincided pretty closely with the publication of Vevay native Edward Eggleston's popular novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana (1871), a fictional recounting of a real-life schoolteacher's experiences in neighboring Jefferson County. Eggleston's novel may offer a glimpse into what the young life of Dale Van Pelt must have been like.

In 1880, Van Pelt was enumerated in Pleasant Township in Switzerland County with his father (a physician), his mother, and other members of the family. Strangely enough (for me), Calvin Bear, my distant relative, was listed on the same page of the census book. Before the decade was out (probably in 1888), Van Pelt set off for Purdue University. Located on the edge of the prairie, Purdue would have been a far cry from the river hills of southern Indiana. Van Pelt thrived there, however. Class historian, football quarterback, president of the Emersonian Society, and art editor of the Debris (the class yearbook founded a few years earlier by John T. McCutcheon), Van Pelt must have been a big man on campus. Upon graduating in 1892 with a degree in mechanics, he went to work as an artist with the Indianapolis Sentinel. Incidentally, Van Pelt's classmates included the poet Charles Cottingham and John S. Wright. I'd like to quote from the website of the John S. Wright Center at Purdue University for more on him:

The Center is named in honor of John Shepard Wright, a member of the Purdue University class of 1892 who, in 1964, provided the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources with a generous endowment for the promotion of forestry in Indiana. Mr. Wright was a botanist, an Eli Lilly executive, and a friend of many forestry leaders in Indiana, particularly Stanley Coulter, Purdue University Professor Daniel DenUyl, and Charles C. Deam, the first state forester of Indiana. [Boldface added.]

Purdue also holds some of Van Pelt's papers, a diary with sketches from a Purdue botany class. I suspect Wright and Van Pelt studied botany together, probably under Stanley Coulter (1853-1943). They may even have been friends.

The period in Dale Van Pelt's life between 1893 (when he was working for the Indianapolis Sentinel) and 1910 (when he was enumerated in the federal census) is a mystery to me. In 1902, he married Minnie M. Wherritt of Shelbyville, Indiana. In 1910, 1920, and 1930, the census taker found him living in Chicago and working as a commercial artist, illustrator, and engraver. During his Chicago years, Van Pelt shared a household with Winnie and their children, as well as with other members of their extended family.

Dale Van Pelt would have turned fifty-eight years old in 1930. He could easily have lived for a couple of more decades. But I'm afraid I don't know his fate. 

In 1940, at age sixty-eight, Van Pelt was still living in Chicago and working as a commercial artist. He died ten years later, on or about September 11, 1950. His drawings are probably now hidden away in old bound volumes of newspapers or on reels of scratchy microfilm. A quick search might turn something up. For now, we'll have to be satisfied with an image from the Purdue Debris from over a century ago, not by him, but of him. The picture below is of the Emersonian Quartet, a vocal group with (left to right) Enos Shaw, high soprano; Dale Van Pelt, low bass (hence his proximity to the floor); Harry Scudder, fine tenor; and Charles Gough, big alto. The artist is unknown. The year was 1889.

Postscript, June 6, 2012: There is reason to believe that this drawing from The Indiana Woman, Irvington Edition, August 7, 1897, is the work of Dale Van Pelt. The time and place are right. The signature at the lower right may clinch it. If this is his work, it may be the first to be published in the last seventy years or more.

Updated on May 15, 2024.

Text copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley