Joseph Allen Minturn (1861-1943)

One hundred years ago today, on April 6, 1917, the United States, with its declaration of war on Germany, entered the Great War, what we now call the First World War or World War I. By the time of the armistice nineteen months later, more than 4.7 million men had answered the call to arms, and more than 110,000 had died in combat, of disease, and by other causes. One who served was Joseph Allen Minturn of Indianapolis, a lawyer, artist, and clubman remembered for being one of the oldest of the officers inducted into the U.S. Army for service in that long-ago war.

Joseph Allen Minturn, known as Joe, was born in Nelsonville, Ohio, on June 20, 1861, shortly after the start of the Civil War. He arrived in Indianapolis in the American centennial year of 1876 and graduated from Indianapolis High School in 1877. Minturn furthered his education at Pennsylvania Military Academy (now Widener University), where he studied civil engineering and chemistry and received his Ph.D. in 1880, and at the law school of Indiana University, completing his studies there in 1895. Minturn started a wood engraving business in Indianapolis in 1881, became a patent attorney in 1895, and was admitted to practice before U.S. Federal Court in 1895 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910. In 1901, Minturn served in the Indiana State Legislature.

Just shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, Minturn enlisted in the U.S. Army in May 1917. In June, the army imposed an age limit of fifty-four for enlistees, and Minturn was discharged. He promptly went to Washington, D.C., and, after a month of lobbying, was reinstated and ordered to report to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis in July 1917. As a newly minted second lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, he was next stationed at Camp Zachary Taylor in Kentucky and began learning about landscape drawing, military draftsmanship, and the new art of camouflage. Service at Camp Sherman, in Minturn's native state of Ohio, followed.

In July 1918, Minturn went overseas with the 309th Engineers, 84th Division, and became an instructor in camouflage and military sketching at Army Infantry Specialists' School in Langres, France. He acted as an observer on the Meuse-Argonne and St. Mihiel fronts and served at General Headquarters in Chaumont. Minturn was promoted to first lieutenant in 1918, to captain in April 1919, and was discharged after two years of service in July 1919. He was then fifty-eight years old.

Once returned to civilian life, Joe Minturn continued in his career as an author and illustrator. He had earlier written Inventor's Friend, or Success with Patents (Indianapolis, 1893), Price-Regulation Under Patents (Indianapolis: Minturn & Woerner, 1916), and The Puritans: An Historical Poem of America, etc. (Noblesville, IN: Butler Printing House, 1917). His book The American Spirit (1921), with illustrations by himself and others, is an account of Minturn's service in the army. (1) Next came Brown County Ballads ([Indianapolis], 1928), Frances Slocum of Miami Lodge, etc. (Indianapolis: Globe Pub. Co., 1928), and finally Historical and Other Poems (Indianapolis: Globe Publishing Co., 1939). (2)

Joseph Minturn was married twice and had two daughters. He was a member of the Methodist Church, Knights of Pythias, Masonic Lodge, Scottish Rite, American Legion, Indiana Society of Mayflower Descendants, and Service Club of Indianapolis. (3) Most of the information here is from the book The Service Club of Indianapolis, 1920-1955, compiled by Howard C. Caldwell (1955). For many years, Minturn was the club's oldest member. He had a farm in Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis, and a cabin, called "Miami Lodge," in Brown County, well south of the city. There he carried on his hobby of painting. Minturn was also of course an engraver and illustrator, and he was lifelong friends with Indianapolis artist and art instructor William Forsyth (1854-1945).

Joseph Allen Minturn died on April 3, 1943, at age eighty-one, and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

Notes

(1) To see the book in its entirety, click on the link:

https://archive.org/details/americanspirit00mint

(2) The list of Minturn's books is from Ohio Authors and Their Books by William Coyle, editor (1962), and Indiana Authors and Their Books 1816-1916, by R.E. Banta, editor (1949), by way of the website Strangers to Us All: Lawyers and Poetry, here.

(3) Minturn, an amateur genealogist, was descended on his mother's side from John Howland and Elizabeth Tillie or Tilley of the original colony. In that descent, he was related to George W. Bush, Chevy Chase, Sarah Palin, and Ted Danson, among many, many others.

Joseph Allen Minturn (1861-1943), a photograph taken in January 1918 in Chaumont, France. Known as tallest man in his company at Fort Harrison, Minturn was best remembered by the men with whom he served for his age and for his snow-white thatch of hair.

Above, a number of illustrations from Minturn's book The American Spirit (1921).

Text copyright 2017, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph A. Trover (1915-2002)

Joseph Albert Trover was born on February 26, 1915, in a place called Four Corners in Vermillion County, Indiana. He studied with Simon Baus, George Jo Mess, C. Curry Bohm, and Edward R. Sitzman. Trover was a member of numerous art associations and won numerous prizes and honors. In addition to being a painter, he was an art teacher and a judge at art shows. You can read more about him at the following website:

http://josephtroverhoosierartist.tripod.com/

Please be aware that some of the information on that website may not be entirely accurate.

Although he grew up in Dana, Indiana, and lived in Indianapolis, Joseph Trover was an artist of Brown County. I have not found any illustration or cartooning credits for him, but a few days ago I discovered at Half-Price Books a few copies of the magazine Outdoor Indiana from the 1960s. There on the cover of the October 1963 issue is the following image:

Bean Blossom is the name of a place in Brown County, a home to artists for more than a century. Trover owned an art gallery there. I have not seen this bridge that I remember, but in some places in Indiana, you don't have to drive far to come across a covered bridge. Parke County, adjacent to Trover's native county, is home to more covered bridges than any other county in America. Every fall, it has a covered bridge festival. By the way, Joseph A. Trover died in 2002.

I have been away for most of the last two months. That explains the lack of postings here. I hope to catch up in July and August with four postings per month. Next: more from Outdoor Indiana.

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln in Indiana

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and lived as an adult in Illinois, but his formative years were spent in what is now Spencer County, Indiana. Young Abe arrived in Indiana in the autumn of 1816, not long before the territory became a state. He was then just seven years old. When he was nine, Abe's mother died of milk sickness, a mysterious disease we now know is caused when cow's milk is poisoned by white snakeroot. Abraham Lincoln of course went on to be a lawyer, a U.S. representative, and, as the first Republican president, the Great Emancipator and the savior of the Union. He wrote: "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother--blessings on her memory." Nancy Hanks Lincoln lies buried in Hoosier soil, near her home on Little Pigeon Creek.

I recently found three books on Indiana history and Abraham Lincoln. I would like to show three illustrations from those books, each by an illustrator previously unknown to me either as an illustrator or by name. Two have birthdays coming up next month.

"A Typical Pioneer Scene" by the Brown County artist Marie Goth. Born in Indianapolis on August 15, 1887, Jessie Marie Goth was educated at Manual Training High School and the Herron School of Art in her home city. Her teachers included fellow Hoosiers William Merle Allison, Harry E. Wood, and William Merritt Chase. Marie also taught art, but she is best known for her portraits. She was in fact the first woman to paint an official portrait of an Indiana governor (Henry F. Schricker). Her younger sister Genevieve, also an artist, married an artist, Carl C. Graf. Marie Goth was otherwise connected by blood or association with artists of the Hoosier Group and among the artists' colony in Brown County, Indiana. Her longtime companion was the artist Veraldo J. Cariani (1891-1969).

The drawing here is from Historic Indiana by Julia Henderson Levering (1916). In his youth, Abraham Lincoln would have lived in a cabin like this one. He also worked on a ferry boat and a flatboat, making a trip to New Orleans in the 1820s. In 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois, leaving his Indiana home behind. By coincidence, Marie Goth lived in a log house in Brown County. She, too, fell victim to poison when she was bitten by a brown recluse spider in the autumn of 1974. In her weakened state, she fell down the steps of her home and died on January 9, 1975.

In 1927, The Indiana Lincoln Union put out a booklet called Lincoln the Hoosier, written by Charles Garrett Vannest and illustrated by a youthful Constance Forsyth. Born in Indianapolis on August 18, 1903, Constance Forsyth was the daughter of artists Alice Atkinson Forsyth and William Forsyth. Like her father, Constance was renowned as a painter and teacher. Her résumé runs to hundreds of items (education, exhibitions, prizes and honors, holdings in museums, teaching career, etc.). One highlight of her career was her assistance to Thomas Hart Benton in his completion of the murals for the Indiana Building at the Century of Progress Exposition, the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. Lincoln the Hoosier was the first of two books she illustrated, the other being The Friends by Esther Buffler (1951). Constance Forsyth died on January 22, 1987, in Austin, Texas.

This map of Lincoln home sites is in a second booklet called Abraham Lincoln: A Concise Biography, published in 1934 by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne. The mapmaker was Noble Brainard, also of Fort Wayne. (The image reproduced in the booklet shows only part of Brainard's original design. The image above is from the Internet.)

Noble Eyck Brainard was born on September 3, 1893, in Buda, Illinois. Like Marie Goth and Constance Forsyth, he was a teacher. For a time he lived in New Mexico, but he also worked as a civil servant in the Philippines and in Fort Wayne, where he resided from the 1920s on. Brainard married Amelia Zichgraf in 1924 in Fort Wayne. The copyright date on the map above is 1933. Brainard died on October 28, 1956, and is buried in his adopted home city. For years, Fort Wayne was home to the Lincoln Museum, one of the largest collections related to Abraham Lincoln in the United States. In 2008, shortly before Abe's bicentennial, the Lincoln Financial Foundation, holder of the collection, donated it to the Indiana State Library and the Allen County Public Library.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005)

The men who conquered Fortress Europe and who stormed the beaches of the South Pacific--the men who survived the war and the sixty-eight years since--are in their waning years. We as a nation have honored them with a memorial in Washington, D.C. Our current commander-in-chief has dishonored them by attempting to keep them out, as if a few moveable barriers and a few yards of plastic tape could discourage men who long ago laid waste to world-spanning totalitarian regimes. In support of our veterans, I will write two postings this month, both on artists who drew and painted pictures of military action.

First, Charles E. Barnes, a Brown County artist born three years and a day before the first Armistice Day. Barnes was born in Chicago on November 10, 1915. The 1920 census found him with his family in Chicago. In 1930 and 1940, they were living in Richmond, Indiana. Barnes relocated to Indianapolis, perhaps sometime in the early 1940s. He taught at the Park School (now Park Tudor) in Indianapolis and kept a studio on McLean Place in the city. When war came, he answered his country's call.

In July 1945, after the war in Europe had ended, the Indianapolis Star published three drawings that PFC Charles E. Barnes had made at Monte Cassino the year before. Fighting had raged there throughout early 1944. The Allies bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino in February. One of Barnes' drawings is dated 1944. The other is undated. It's clear, though, that he was there shortly after the Germans finally withdrew in May. In the articles, Barnes was described as "a veteran of the North African and Italian campaigns." He in fact spent four years with the 704th Engineers as a camouflage technician not only in North Africa and Italy but also in Sicily and France.

Charles E. Barnes studied at the Herron School of Art, the Santa Monica School of Design, and the School of Modern Photography. Francis Chapin (1899-1965) was among his instructors. One of his classmates at Herron was also his friend, cartoonist Dick Wingert (1919-1993). In his fine art, executed before and after the war, Barnes was an abstract painter. More than fifty universities and museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, held or hold his works. Barnes was art director at Argo Films in New York City and a charter member of the Creative Film Society in Hollywood. For many years he operated the Modern Art Center, later the Charles E. Barnes Art Center, located across from the north entrance to Brown County State Park in Nashville, Indiana. Brown County is renowned for its fall color, its art colony, and of course as home to Kin Hubbard's wry observer of human folly, Abe Martin.

Barnes had a stroke in his mid sixties. Though paralyzed on his left side and halting in his speech, he continued to create works of art every day. "Well, sure, I have to," he said. Charles Barnes died on March 31, 2005. He was eighty-nine years old.

Drawings made by PFC Charles E. Barnes at Monte Cassino, Italy, 1944, and published in 1945. From the Indianapolis Star, July 15 and 29, 1945.

Indiana artist Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005). From the Indianapolis Star, Oct. 9, 1969.

Updated on July 17, 2020.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Lottie Lyons Grow (1884-1981)

Lotta Lyons Grow, nicknamed "Lottie," was born on July 22, 1884, in Hymera, a small town in Sullivan County, Indiana. Her father was a farmer, her mother a homemaker. Lottie graduated from Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, in 1904 and taught high school in Hymera for five years. She also attended the Herron School of Art and Marian College, both in Indianapolis, and the St. Louis Art Institute. In 1910 Lottie married Walter Smith Grow (1880-?), an osteopathic physician, and afterwards lived in Indianapolis. In 1911, a month after their daughter Bernadine was born, the Grows set off for South America, returning in 1912. Tragedy struck the Grow family in 1932 when Bernadine, a student in Chicago, died at age twenty. I don't wonder that biographical details are missing from the life of Lottie Lyons Grow for the following half decade.

From 1937 to 1944, Lottie wrote a column for Indiana Club Women, and from 1938 to 1946 for Art Digest. She also contributed to News Week. She is supposed to have been the first in Indiana to give art programs on radio and television. During World War II, she served in hospitals in the Pacific Theater and promoted art therapy for wounded servicemen. Like so many Hoosier artists, Lottie painted and sketched in the hills of Brown County south of Indianapolis, where she kept a studio. She also exhibited in the Hoosier Salon. A painter and graphic artist, Lottie created landscapes, floral paintings, and etchings. She also authored three books, at least one of which she illustrated herself. They were: Cameos of Deer-Lick in Brown County Hills (1957), Over the Split-Rail Fence (1971, illustrated by the author), and Beckoning Trails (1979).

Lottie Lyons Grow lived for nearly a century and passed away on November 2, 1981, in Wabash, Indiana. She was ninety-seven years old.

Three works by Indiana artist Lottie Lyons Grow (1884-1981).

Text and captions copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley