Hoosier Cartoonists on the Cover of Judge

The Sunday newspaper comic section in America has its origins, as so much of our popular culture does, in the late nineteenth century. The Sunday comics are of course in color, and they got their start as inexpensive competitors to (and imitators of) the color comic weeklies, first of which was Puck, founded in 1876 by Austrian-born artist Joseph Keppler (1838-1894).  (1) After Puck came The Judge in 1881, then Life, in 1883, the latter made famous by Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944), creator of the Gibson Girl.

Puck, The Judge, and Life benefitted from innovations in printing technology, as well as from improved methods of mass production and mass transportation in the late 1800s. Newspaper printing lagged by comparison, but in 1892, the Chicago Inter Ocean became the first paper to print a color supplement. The Sunday comic supplement--what became the Sunday comic section and ultimately just the Sunday comics--soon became a feature of big-city papers in New York and Chicago. By the early or mid 1900s, even smaller papers had full-color Sunday comics, although they often outsourced the printing to companies in St. Louis, Buffalo, etc.

Although Puck ceased publication in 1918, its covers and especially its double-sized center spreads are still with us. If you look hard enough, you'll find them at antique stores and malls, as well as on line, usually at reasonable prices. The old Life magazine, on the other hand, has been largely forgotten. If you mention Life, most people think of the photojournalistic version of 1936-2000. Copies of the old Life may be hard to come by.

The Judge, usually just called Judge, is probably the least well known of the three, having come to an end in 1947, beyond living memory for most people of today. In its day, though, the magazine featured covers by Rea Irvin (1881-1972), John Held, Jr. (1889-1958), and Dr. Seuss (1904-1991), among many other luminaries of the popular arts in America. 

Hoosiers had their place on the cover of Judge as well, chiefly Don Herold (1889-1966) of Bloomfield. Below are a few of his covers, plus a bonus cover by Nate Collier (1883-1961), who, though he didn't enjoy the good fortune of having been born in Indiana, studied cartooning by correspondence with the National School of Illustrating of Indianapolis and worked as a cartoonist for the Kokomo Dispatch in the early 1900s.

Note

(1) Although I have not found any direct record of Joseph Keppler's sojourn in Indianapolis in the late 1860s to about 1870, I have an article that says that he indeed lived in that city before moving on to St. Louis. By the way, Keppler should not be confused with the artist Max Francis Klepper (1861-1907), as has happened so often.

Judge, the Etiquette Number from November 28, 1925, with a cover by Don Herold.

Judge, February 27, 1926, again with a cover by Herold.

Judge, April 24, 1926, with a cover by Don Herold and "T.S."

Judge, Younger Set Number, July 17, 1926. Don Herold was once again the artist. His theme (and pun): "How to Rear a Daughter." You might think that no one has ever looked like a Don Herold cartoon. In fact, many of his male figures were more or less self-portraits. By the way, Herold's daughter was Doris Herold Lund (1919-2003), author of the book Eric (1974). Herold is also the originator of the quote, "Actresses happen even in the best families."

Judge, Red Number, date unknown, with a cover by Don Herold. 

Finally, Judge, The Great Melodrama Number, January 28, 1928, with a cover drawing by Nate Collier.

Text copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Howard Pyle in Indiana

On the evening of December 4, 1903, Howard Pyle spoke in front of the Irvington Athenæum, a literary and cultural club formed a few years earlier by members of the faculty at Butler University. It was Pyle's first visit to Indiana, but he would not have come as an unknown to a state then renowned for its native and resident artists, including William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), T.C. Steele (1847-1926), William Forsyth (1854-1935), Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914), Otto Stark (1859-1926), and J. Ottis Adams (1851-1927). Some of these men may even have been in the audience on that December evening of long ago. What they heard may have sounded something like a manifesto, a call to the American artist to draw and paint pictures of his or her own time and place, to distinguish himself by placing his art first before the editor of the popular magazine, then before the vast reading public. This would be an art for the common man, made possible by rapid and radical advances in technology, also by a democratic way of life in which art would be available to all and would reflect the experiences of all. It's no coincidence that Pyle would use in his talk a comparison to the development of the steam engine, for with the invention of the steam engine and the popular, pictorial magazine--and by extension all of the other institutions and innovations of liberal democracy--a new age was upon the earth. (1) And by the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was the leading nation of that new age. Here, then, is the text of an article telling about Howard Pyle's visit in Indiana, from the Indianapolis News, December 5, 1903, page 7:

HOWARD PYLE SPEAKS ON ART OF THE AGE

NOTED ILLUSTRATOR BEFORE IRVINGTON ATHENAEUM.

THE REALLY AMERICAN ART

  Howard Pyle, the noted author, artist and illustrator, lectured last night before the Athenæum Club, of Irvington, on "The Art of the Age." He was accompanied by his wife, and an informal reception followed the lecture. He was introduced to the audience by H.U. Brown, (2) who referred to his as coming from the State of Delaware, and said that this was Mr. Pyle’s first visit to Indiana.

  Mr. Pyle said: "I must confess that I do come from the effete East, but I hope you will not hold that against me. Many of you here have come from the East, and you may remember that there are glass houses in the West as well as in the East."

  He defined art as representing in imagery and picture that for which the age stands in which that art is created. The pictures of the past that have lived have been those that truly represented the age in which they were produced. They might be faulty in drawing or in color, but they were necessarily true in technique. Botticelli’s pictures, he said, represent the childlike enthusiasm of the people of his day as in a later day the creations Michaelangelo [sic] and those of the great Flemish and Spanish painters represent the enormous robustness of an age that was nearing completion.

"So we," he argued, "should hand down to those who follow us the living imagery of what this age stands for. A work of art is a mental image made possible by means of certain technical methods. Everything created by the hand of man must first exist in his mind.

Must Live in Our Own Age

"We can not live to-day in the nineteenth, the eighteenth or the seventeenth century, nor in any century but our own. That which possesses life and power must arise from a living vital mind; otherwise it can not have life. This age is separated from those that are gone by something radical and vital. In the past men lived in a world of effect. To-day we live in a world of causes. The difference between these is the difference between something and nothing. Let us take the creation of the steam engine, the first conception of a young lad observing the kettle boiling over the fire. He sees the steam raise the lid. How was James Watt different from those who had gone before? Millions had seen that same phenomena [sic] of the kettle. In that one moment of observation Watt had stepped from one age into another. At that moment of observation we passed into a new age, the teeming energy of today. * * *

"Do we keep pace in other forms of art with this marvelous phenomenon brought about by the discovery of the power of steam? Do we paint the living things we see to-day about us? Do we paint the pictures that unite man to man, or do we imitate the painters who have gone, who belong to an age that is past? Have we as Americans fulfilled the possibilities of our art?

"We are the possessors of the greatest glories any nation in the world can call its own. We are the inheritors of all the ages. Does our art represent the age in which we live? I think not. We have the greatest sculptors of the world today. Possibly the greatest portrait painters are Americans. It is likely the landscape artists of this country are the peers of those of any other country, but have we created an art that stands for the age? Have our artists in their studios poured forth upon their canvases the life that belongs to this age? I think not.

Wonderful Possibilities

"I think, instead, there is a vast pottering after effects—an effort to produce effects in reds and greens and blues. Look at the wonderful possibilities that lie within our country to create the greatest pictures that could exist in the world. Is there nothing in all our redundant [sic] life that a man must seek the galleries of Europe and learn his mechanism in the schools of Paris?

"The one American art that exists to-day is the art of the illustrator. The illustrator creates that which is American. He is compelled to do so. He has the severest critic in the world—the editor of the magazine, who must consider that which the million people desire to have pictured for them. If there is a failure to do this the magazine will prove a failure. The magazine artist must represent that which is about him.

"So, in the magazine are to be seen all the phases of American life as they stand nowhere else. And from this is to arise the art that is to be handed down to the future. When we begin to paint pictures that are representatIve of American life, all we ask is your support and encouragement. Then other rewards will come fast enough."

* * *

Now known as the father of illustration in America, Howard Pyle (1853-1911) started his own school of illustration in his native city of Wilmington, Delaware, in 1900. His most famous student was undoubtedly N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), but others at his Brandywine School included Hoosier illustrators Gayle Porter Hoskins (1887-1962) of Brazil, Herbert Moore (1881-1943) of Indianapolis, and Olive Rush (1866-1973) of Fairmount. Another student, Frank Schoonover (1877-1972), taught at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

* * *

It is ironic in view of Howard Pyle's words before the Irvington Athenæum that he died and was interred not in the New World but in the Old. He went to Italy in June 1910 for his health and to study the murals in that country. He fell ill and contemplated a return stateside. Instead, Pyle died in Florence on November 9, 1911. A Quaker, he was interred at the Cimitero degli Inglesi, or English Cemetery, a burial ground for Protestants and other non-Roman Catholics. I have been to his grave. It is a simple niche in a columbarium or mausoleum, located towards the rear of the cemetery. The face of the niche, perhaps about the same dimensions as an old-fashioned magazine cover turned sideways, possibly a little larger, is marked only with his name. (I don't think even his dates are on the marker, but I can't be sure. This was several years ago, and we were there at closing hours in late fall, too dark for picture-taking.) If nothing else, the marker on his grave should read: "Father of Illustration in America."

Notes
(1) By Howard Pyle's reference to the invention of the steam engine, I am reminded of Henry Adams' dynamo as a symbol of a changing age, from The Education of Henry Adams (1918).
(2) H.U. Brown was Hilton U. Brown (1859-1958), a graduate of Butler College (later Butler University); reporter, editor, general manager, and vice-president for and of the Indianapolis News; and president of the board of directors of Butler University. When we were kids, our local branch of the Indianapolis Public Library was named for him. I remember seeing his daughter, the author Jean Brown Wagoner (1896-1996), at the Brown Branch, at our school, or maybe somewhere else. My classmate Mary Wagoner is her granddaughter. If I have my geography right, Hilton U. Brown lived across Emerson Avenue from the artist and teacher William Forsyth. I believe his property in Irvington, on the east side of Indianapolis, became part of the grounds of Thomas Carr Howe High School. Now, in our very democratic age, the former site of his grand home is occupied by a gas station.

Images from Howard Pyle and His Hoosier Students

The Mermaid, by Howard Pyle, 1910.

A work by Gayle Porter Hoskins, date unknown.

An illustration by Herbert Moore from The Men Who Founded America (1909).

Finally, two covers for Woman's Home Companion by Olive Rush, the December issues of two successive years, 1908 and 1909.

Original text copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Frank H. Wagner (1870-1942) & Mary North Wagner (1875-1957)

In doing my research for today's posting, I was reminded of an exchange from What's Up, Doc? (1972):

Hugh: I am Hugh.

Judge Maxwell: You are me?

Hugh: No, I am Hugh.

Judge Maxwell: Stop saying that. Make him stop saying that.

What does a screwball comedy from the 1970s have to do with Indiana illustrators? Only this: If you look for a Hoosier artist named Frank U. Wagner, you'll end up going down the wrong path and for a very long way. In the end, you will be lost. And why is that? Because the artist's name was not Frank U. Wagner, as people even from his own time often believed, but Frank Hugh Wagner.

Frank Hugh Wagner was born on January 4, 1870, in Milton, Indiana. A painter, sculptor, illustrator, and teacher, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Frederick Freer (1849-1908) and John Vanderpoel (1857-1911). Wagner exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and with the Hoosier Salon. Wagner also taught art--including illustration and cartooning--at Winona College in Winona Lake, Indiana, during its brief existence in the early 1900s.

Although Frank Wagner's name can be found here and there on the Internet, he is not well remembered. I can offer on his behalf two claims to fame. First, Wagner applied for and received a patent for a type of picture book now called a "tunnel book." Rather than explain the concept, I'll just show an image from the Official Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, dated June 11, 1912 (page 322):

The Hole Book by Peter Newell (1862-1924), published in 1908, the same year in which Wagner applied for his patent, is a similar type of book. I don't know whether Frank Wagner ever published a tunnel book, but at least he received a patent for just such a design. Note the name on the patent: "Frank U. Wagner."

Second, Frank H. Wagner drew the illustrations for Ten Little Brownie Men: The Second Brownie Book (1911), which was written by a brother-and-sister team, Nathaniel Moore Banta and Alpha Banta Benson. The Brownies, created by the Canadian illustrator and cartoonist Palmer Cox (1840-1924), were wildly popular in books, magazines, and newspaper comics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I'm not sure what relationship if any the Bantas had with Palmer Cox. In any case, Nathaniel M. Banta and Alpha Banta Benson of Renssalaer, Indiana, are subject for a blog posting of another day.

Frank Wagner was married to Mary Lovett North, an illustrator, painter, book designer, and lecturer in her own right. She was born on December 24, 1875, in Milford, Kosciusko County, Indiana. Her parents were Captain Samson Jackson North, a lawyer and a Civil War veteran, and Mary A. Egbert North. Mary L. North was also descended from David Grosset Drake (1759-1850), a private in the New York troops during the Revolutionary War. Like her husband, Mary L. North Wagner studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Freer and Vanderpoel and exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exposition and with the Hoosier Salon. Among her other teachers was the Hoosier artist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Mary also exhibited with the Chicago Society of Miniature Painters.

Alone or with her husband, Mary North Wagner wrote and illustrated a children's book called The Adventures of Jimmy Carrot (1911). She also wrote the lyrics for a song called "The Brownie" (music by Maude L. McLaughlin). The 1930 census listed Mary as a lecturer in art. The Wagners' great-granddaughter, Tammy Setterquist Hepp, has let us know that Mary North Wagner lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Frank and Mary Wagner lived in Milford, Indiana, and in Chicago and raised a large brood of six seven children. [See the comments below.] Frank Wagner died on July 21, 1942, in Chicago. In later years, Mary Wagner lived on a yacht called the Morie, moored in the yacht basin in Alexandria, Virginia, with her son, John North Wagner. He worked for the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving and appeared in a book called How Money Is Made, presumably a book by David C. Cooke published in 1962. Mary Lovett North Wagner died on June 21, 1957, in Alexandria, Alexandria City, Virginia. She was eighty-one years old.

Revised on September 29, 2024. Thanks to Tammy Setterquist Hepp, comment below, for further information on her great-grandmother.

The cover, title page, and endpapers for Ten Little Brownie Men: The Second Brownie Book (1911) by N. Moore Banta and Alpha Banta Benson and illustrated by Frank U. Wagner. ("Stop saying that. Make him stop saying that.") Note that the lyrics to the Brownie song are by Mary North Wagner.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The First Art School in Indiana

No one can say for sure who was the first Indiana artist, illustrator, or cartoonist. However, in a book called American Pioneer Arts and Artists (1942), the author, Carl W. Drepperd, is unequivocal about the date, place, and founder of the Hoosier State's first school of art:

At New Harmony, Indiana, William McClure opened the first school for drawing, painting, engraving and lithography in the state, 1826. Charles Alexander [sic] Lesueur was the art teacher at the New Harmony School, 1826 to 1837.

William McClure (1763-1840) was a Scottish-born geologist, cartographer, merchant, and educator. He is known as "the father of American geology." If a map is an illustration, then McClure might be considered one of the earliest of Indiana illustrators. He made a geological map of the United States published in 1809 and 1817. In the mid 1820s, he settled in Robert Owen's Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, and established a school for adults. Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846), the art teacher at New Harmony, was a French artist and naturalist and a friend of William McClure. He also served as a kind of unofficial artist of the New Harmony experiment. Also in residence at New Harmony was David Dale Owen (1807-1860), son of Robert Owen and a geologist and artist.

The community at New Harmony received visitors in the winter of 1832-1833 in the persons of  Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (1782-1867), a German aristocrat, explorer, naturalist, and ethnologist, and the artist Johann Carl Bodmer, better known Karl Bodmer (1809-1893). Bodmer was a painter, graphic artist, and illustrator. His work as such would place him in a category as one of Indiana's first illustrators, along with McClure, Lesueur, and Robert Dale Owen.

In his book, Drepperd mentions another early art school within a "female seminary" (the Monroe County Female Academy), located in Bloomington and maintained by Cornelius Pering from 1832 to 1849. Pering, an English-born educator, was born in 1806 and died in 1881.

Mollusks and zoophytes, drawn by Charles Alexandre Lesueur, one of the first Indiana illustrators. This drawing is from 1807, prior to Lesueur's arrival in the Hoosier State.

A drawing of the eastern quoll or eastern native cat (Dasyurus viverrinus), an Australian marsupial, also by Lesueur (date unknown).

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

National School of Illustrating

At one time, Indianapolis was a leader in the arts. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, prominent Indianapolitans banded together to establish the Art Association of Indianapolis, the Society of Western Artists, the Indiana Artists Club, and other art institutions. In 1893, Modern Art, a magazine of the arts and crafts movement and the first of its kind, began publication in Indianapolis. During that same decade, the second Indiana School of Art, under William Forsyth, operated out of studios in downtown Indianapolis. Although that school closed its doors in 1897, its successor, the Herron School of Art, opened in 1902 and is still in existence as part of Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. One of the most significant developments in Indiana art of the 1890s was the arrival of the Hoosier School, composed of William Forsyth, Otto Stark, T.C. Steele, J. Ottis Adams, and Richard B. Gruelle. Less well known is that during the 1890s, Indianapolis newspapers took advantage of recent technological developments to begin printing cartoons and illustrations in greater numbers. In that first decade of more advanced and reliable reproduction of artwork, newspapers in Indianapolis hired men who would make their names known in the world of book design, illustration, cartooning, and other graphic arts. They included Frederick Coffay Yohn, Arthur Sinclair Covey, Bruce Rogers, Kin Hubbard (Abe Martin), Johnny Gruelle (Raggedy Ann), and Sidney Smith (The Gumps).

If newspapers and magazines were to fill their pages with illustrations, they would need well trained illustrators, and lots of them. Schools of art flourished in late nineteenth century America, but their instruction was concentrated in the fine arts. Commercial art held a place far down on the list of worthy artistic endeavors. I have found references to a school of illustration operating in Indianapolis in the 1890s or early 1900s. There may have been more than one in fact. But there isn't any mention of such a school in The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis or other sources I have checked. Then I found two advertisements for the National School of Illustrating:

The first advertisement is from 1900, the second from an unknown date, but perhaps about 1902. The Butler University yearbook of 1899 refers to the National Illustrating Company as "the oldest, largest and leading engraving house in the state." A directory of Indianapolis from about the same time lists the institution as a company of engravers, electrotypers, designers, and artists. A man named Carl Anderson was listed as director of the school. Carl Anderson was also the name of the cartoonist who drew the pantomime comic strip Henry, but I don't see how the chronology of his life would have placed the cartoonist Carl Anderson in Indianapolis in the early 1900s. I hope someone can tell me differently because I would like to add Anderson's name to my list of Hoosier cartoonists.

The "Heeb System" was named for Emmett Jerome Heeb, also known as E.J. Heeb. Born on June 11, 1858, in Fayette County, Indiana, Heeb was an educator, publisher, auctioneer, and businessman. At one time or another he was affiliated with the Indianapolis College of Law and the National Correspondence Schools. The National Correspondence Schools had their offices in the When Building, located at 28 to 40 North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis (1), an address inclusive of the addresses shown in the first advertisement above. Coincidentally or not, the When Building was the work of John Tomlinson Brush, a prominent businessman and himself an artist. The 1906 directory of Indianapolis informs us that Heeb founded the Indianapolis Business University in 1850, an impossibility given his year of birth. In any case, the school offered instruction and training in every kind of business, including not only illustration and cartooning, but also bookkeeping, stenography, telegraphy, banking, law, pharmacy, writing, and advertising.

Heeb died in Los Angeles on March 29, 1950. I don't know what happened to his National School of Illustrating. I'd like to find out more about the school and its students. Some studied by correspondence, some in residence. Cartoonist Nate Collier (1883-1961) did both. William F. Heitman (1878-1945) may have been with the school as well. The name Indiana Illustrating Company, cited in articles about Heitman, may simply have been misremembered long after the school had given up the ghost.

Note

(1) Source: The Journal Handbook of Indianapolis: An Outline of History by Max Robinson Hyma, pp. 210, 211-212.

Text copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley

Wilson Reed Berry (1851-1928)

On Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913, after two days of high winds, heavy rains began to fall on the northern Indiana town of Logansport. By Tuesday, March 25, the Wabash River was out of its banks and beginning to inundate the city. Located at the confluence of the Eel River and the Wabash River, the longest in Indiana, Logansport was under water for three days. Miraculously, by noon on Friday, a week after the winds had begun, the river was back in its banks and Logansport had begun its recovery from that great and memorable flood.

Just east of where the Eel River flows into the Wabash, Biddle's Island saw severe damage and destruction that spring. Both bridges to the island were out, one a wreck, the other swept away. A large house on the island, called appropriately enough “Island Home,” was also flooded. Built in the previous century by John Tipton, Island Home was long the residence of Horace P. Biddle (1811-1900), a lawyer, judge, poet, musicologist, and member of the Indiana constitutional convention of 1850. His house on Biddle’s Island "was filled with flowers, music, art, and the largest private library in Indiana of more than 8,500 books." (1) An insatiable reader and largely self-taught, Biddle died in 1900. His house was eventually acquired by another autodidact, Wilson Reed Berry, a man who, in contrast, was not known to have read a book in his lifetime. The flood of 1913 inundated Island Home and damaged or destroyed Berry's collection of paintings and pioneer artifacts, as well as (presumably) a letter from Queen Victoria congratulating Berry on his success as an artist. Despite the loss of his home and prized possessions, Berry soldiered on, painting until the end of his life.

Wilson Reed Berry, nicknamed Wils or Wiltz, came from a large Indiana farm family. He was born on April 22, 1851, in Cass County, the seventh of John H. and Harriett Reed Berry's thirteen children. Descended from a Revolutionary War veteran, Wils Berry grew up near Adamsboro, Indiana. As a boy he was more interested in drawing and painting than any other profession or trade. At age twenty-one and encouraged by an older local artist, John Forgy, Berry submitted some drawings to the Beldon Atlas Company of Chicago. Hired as a sketch artist, Berry traveled for ten years over thirty states and into Canada, drawing and painting landscapes and pictures of farms and animals. Berry also drew the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, a work that was later sent to the royal family, the same work that won him accolades from Queen Victoria.

Berry's mother died in 1872 and his father remarried in 1874. Wils Berry may have met his future wife at his father's wedding. Her name was Emma Conner and she had good reason to be there, for her mother, Ellen Sackett Conner, was John Berry's bride. Wils Berry and Emma Conner were married on January 30, 1878, in Cass County. The young couple took a stagecoach across an iced-over Lake Ontario for their honeymoon trip. By year's end, they had had a son, Murillo, born in Canada on December 9, 1878. In their travels, the Berry family lived in hotels and boarding houses. In 1880, they were in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Nineteen hundred found them back in Indiana, on a Fulton County farm. Eventually they returned to their home county to the south and settled in Logansport.

In the mid 1890s, Wils Berry taught painting at Michael's College (formerly Smithson College), located north of Logansport at the summit of College Hill. Nearly two decades before a flood destroyed his home, a fire burned the main college building on October 6, 1896, leaving a mere shell of blackened brick and Berry without a job. Berry's daughter remembered the event: "My mother and I were shopping when that happened. She thought it might have been our house on fire when she saw the smoke. My father didn't really lose anything in the fire, but the college was destroyed and they never rebuilt it." (2) To make up for the lost employment, Berry began giving private art lessons to the young ladies of Logansport. It was not uncommon after that to see him and his students about town, painting en plein air. (3)

By 1910, Berry was living on Biddle's Island with his family gathered around him. In addition to Berry’s wife Emma, there was their oldest child, Don Murillo, a painter in oil and watercolor. (4) Younger brother Willis wielded a brush as well, but he worked as a painter of houses instead of canvases. Virgil practiced law, while Inez taught kindergarten. (The remaining child, teacher, sketch artist, and painter Percy Berry, had died nearly a decade before.) The flood of 1913 may have brought their family idyll to an end. By 1920, the Berrys lived on Gate Street in Logansport, but only Willis remained at home.

A sometime farmer and collector of paintings and artifacts from pioneer days, Berry painted and sketched throughout his life. In addition to drawing and painting pictures of family farms, he created murals, painted curtains for opera houses, and decorated circus wagons in nearby Peru, winter home of the nation's circuses. Logansport Republicans carried his painting "Abe Lincoln the Rail-Splitter" in their parades and displayed it in their headquarters. Berry also created works for hotels in French Lick and Huntington. Today his work is in the collections of  the Cass County Historical Society and the La Porte County Historical Society Museum. Wilson Reed Berry died on April 28, 1928, and is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in the county of his birth.

Notes
(1) "Judge Biddle of Biddle's Island" by Richard B. Copeland, Logansport Pharos-Tribune, May 2, 2008.

(2) Quoted in an interview of Inez Berry Brunegraff (1890-1989) in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune, date unknown.

(3) Michael's College was in operation from 1895 to 1896, hence Berry would not have taught there for long.

(4) Murillo Berry (1878-1965), also called Don or Don Murillo, was an artist like his father. Murillo's full name may in fact have been Don Murillo Berry, perhaps after the Spanish Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), or he may have assumed the name "Don" as an honorific.

Acknowledgements

I thank La Porte County Historian Fern Eddy Schultz for her extensive research on Wilson Reed Berry and his family and for her securing permission to publish Berry's painting below. Much of the information I used to write this article came from her. I also acknowledge the work of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum for their accounts of the razing of Michael's College and the flood of 1913.

Painter and illustrator Wilson Reed "Wils" Berry (1851-1928) in an undated photograph in the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum.

"Granville Kesling Farm, Onward, Indiana" by Wils Berry, a watercolor owned by Dr. Peter Kesling and on display in the Kesling Room at the La Porte County Historical Society Museum, 2405 Indiana Avenue, Suite 1, La Porte, IN 46350. Photograph by Fern Eddy Schultz. These days, pictures like this one are taken from the air by pilot-photographers. In Berry's time, a sketch artist or landscape artist created views of the family farm, often more conceptual or idealized than naturalistic. And it was drawings like this one that would be reproduced in county atlases.

For example, this drawing (which may or may not have been created by Wils Berry), showing "Island Home" on Biddle's Island in Logansport, was probably printed in a county atlas. However, the source is unknown. Berry lived on Biddle's Island until the house shown here was inundated in the great flood of 1913. Judge Biddle had passed away many years before, in 1900. Despite the history of flooding, Biddles Island (without the apostrophe) is inhabited today. The foundation of Island Home may be hiding under the lawns of today's middle-class residences. Note the bridges in the foreground and background and the buildings of Logansport in the background on the left. The bridge in the foreground looks like the one in the photograph below.

The wreckage of the Biddle [sic] Island Bridge in Logansport, Indiana, following the flooding of March 25-28, 1913. I'm not familiar enough with Logansport to tell the view or if Island Home or its remains might be visible in this photograph (from the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum).

For a brief time in the 1890s, Wilson Reed Berry taught painting at Michael's College in Logansport. Founded as Smithson College, the school is shown here in a photograph from the 1870s, in the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum. The building, a grand Gothic structure, was reduced to a mere shell after a fire of October 6, 1896.

A view from Smithson College looking southward to Logansport. Smithson College was in operation from 1872 to  1878, but even in later years, when the facility was known as American Normal College (1883-1888) or Michael's College (1895-1896), it was still referred to as Smithson College. In any case, this photograph, in the collection of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, is undated but probably from the 1870s.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley