Paula Dunn

Sixty years ago this week, Noblesville’s homegrown department store, the Craycraft Dry Goods Co., closed its doors for good. In announcing the closing, the January 2, 1962 Noblesville Daily Ledger observed that 1962 would have been Craycraft’s 95th year in business. I’m afraid they were a little off. In digging through the old newspapers I…

I’ve got some reader feedback to catch up on! After the column about R. C. (Roland) Foland’s Polar Bear activities ran, Marilyn Conner and Larry Cloud both brought up local attorney Arvin Foland, who died just a few years ago. Marilyn wondered if the two men were related. They were — Arvin was R. C.…

Reverend Barney Stone, the longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church, may have been the best known former slave to call Noblesville home, but he certainly wasn’t the only one. In 1900 another Noblesville resident who’d been a slave, Lucy Washington, achieved a small measure of fame when various Indiana newspapers noted she was possibly…

Four years ago, when I wrote a column about the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, it just seemed like an interesting chapter in our county’s history. It never occurred to me then that a few years later we’d be dealing with our own pandemic. While there are differences between the two outbreaks, there are also…

I didn’t intend to devote two columns to Col. R. C. Foland, but while I was researching his Polar Bear activities, I noticed his auctioneering career was pretty interesting, too. He put as much energy into promoting auctions as THE way to sell real estate as he did in trying to recruit members for his…

A few years ago, while thumbing through the Noblesville Daily Ledger’s 1992 pictorial history of Hamilton County, I was startled to run across a rather cheeky  — and I mean that in every sense of the word — photo of local auctioneer,  Col. R. C. (Roland C.) Foland. (He wasn’t in the military. “Colonel” is…

About this time, 120 years ago, the talk of the town was one of the most heinous murders ever to take place in Hamilton County, a crime so infamous, it made newspapers around the country. The victim was a 27 year-old Richmond, Virginia native named John Seay. Seay had come here seven years earlier to…

Well, we’ve made it through another year — pandemic and all. If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know what comes next. This is when I recognize all our Notable Nineties by printing the entire list. If you’re not a regular reader, an explanation is in order. When Jerry Snyder was writing her…

(This originally appeared in 2020, but is still valid.) Feeling down because Noblesville’s annual Christmas parade was canceled this year due to the pandemic? Don’t worry, I have a solution. I’ve borrowed a time machine so we can go back to December 1, 1962 to see Noblesville’s very first Christmas parade.  I got the contraption…

Okay, hands up everybody who’s ever written a letter to Santa Claus. If your hand is waving in the air, you’re part of a tradition that dates back to the early 1870s. What children in those days didn’t know, however, is that Santa never received that mail. Although some letters were forwarded to local charity…