Paula Dunn

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…

If businesses were eligible for the Notable Nineties list, the Gatewood Vegetable Farm and Greenhouse would be a Sensational Centenarian. The four-generation family business is celebrating its 100th year in 2022, a distinction few local operations can claim. And to think, it all started in 1915 with 50 baby chicks that came shipped in an…

It’s baaack! After a two year absence because of Covid, the Herb Society of Central Indiana’s annual Spring Symposium is returning to the Hamilton County 4-H Fairgrounds on Saturday, April 9, from 9 a.m. to 2:20 p.m. To make up for the lost time, there will be presentations on the Herbs of the Year for…

Over the years I’ve run across quite a few stories in the old newspapers that deal with people discovering, or disclosing, the existence of various items of historical significance to Hamilton County — objects that, if uncovered today, would probably end up in some museum. In most cases, I don’t know what became of these…

I haven’t written anything about Arcadia for quite a while, so I was pleased when I recently ran across an item in an old Noblesville Daily Ledger that referred to the Arcadia Fiber (or “Fibre,” depending on the source) Basket Company. I’m familiar with Arcadia’s glass factory, the canning factory, and the cheese factory, but…

When I wrote about Lucy Washington a few weeks ago I noted that she was the great-great grandmother of award-winning African American author Cyrus Colter. Colter was born in Noblesville in 1910 and I’d originally planned to feature him in this week’s column, but in doing the research, I found myself getting sidetracked by his…