Paula Dunn

When I was a kid, that meant no more school until after Labor Day, fun at the Forest Park pool, movies at the ABC Drive-in . . . and a week of Girl Scout day camp! I wish I could tell you where the camp was held, but it’s been (ahem) a few years and…

You may have noticed I’ve used this column in the past to fill in some of the local minority history (African American, Jewish and Chinese) that’s missing from the county history books. I would have liked to have covered some Hispanic or Latino history as well, but the truth is, Hispanics and Latinos haven’t had…

I’ve written about Memorial Day before, but I’ve never really gotten into the earliest history of the holiday in Hamilton County. First, a little background . . . Memorial Day dates back to 1868 when General John A. Logan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.,) an organization of Union Army veterans,…

Welcome once again to the From Time to Thyme Virtual Museum. We have some new exhibits of lost Hamilton County historical objects! Step this way to see a beaver hat made in 1806. According to the October 15, 1929, Noblesville Daily Ledger, the original owner of the hat was Samuel Carey, a prominent Philadelphia Quaker.…

One hundred years ago this week a Westfield woman secured her 15 minutes of fame — not by saving someone from a burning building or anything like that, but by baking a pie! The story actually began a few months earlier in February when Indiana Senator Harry S. New and his wife came to Noblesville…

Boy, am I late with a reader column this time! I had to go all the way back to February to catch up. Remember when I wrote about the Craycraft’s Dry Goods Company? Pam Ferber had clearer memories of the water fountain in Craycraft’s than I did. She described it as a white bubbler fountain…

With the Blatchley Nature Study Club celebrating its 100th anniversary this month, this seemed like the perfect time to devote a column to the man most responsible for the club’s existence, Dr. Earl Brooks. Although Dr. Brooks is probably best known as a naturalist, that was just one facet of his amazing life. He truly…

If you’ve ever studied a map of Hamilton County, you can’t fail to notice this county has several roads that go nowhere. Well okay, they actually do go SOMEwhere; they just don’t lead where you might expect because the communities for which they were named no longer exist. In a few cases, like Cyntheanne and…

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially after last week’s column on Kirk’s Hardware was such a downer, but I wanted to let people know the Noblesville (i.e. Hamilton East) library is about to lose one of its most valuable assets. On April 22, Nancy Massey, the library’s Indiana Room Coordinator, will…

It just breaks my heart that we’ve lost Kirk’s Hardware. I’ve always considered it, Smith’s Jewelers, the Uptown Cafe and Syd’s, the four pillars of downtown Noblesville because they’re the four oldest businesses on the courthouse square. While it’s hard to imagine the square without any one of them, it’s especially difficult to process Kirk’s…