Between the Lines: Family History and Quirky Stories From Our Forgotten Past

     This is the first of a multi-part story about my third great-grandfather’s life. I chose to write about Myron Fitch Barbour in-depth for a number of reasons. One is that his extraordinary life was like a bridge between an agrarian, Colonial past and the modern era the Industrial Revolution brought to America. This was someone who touched the family born in Revolutionary times, and yet, he was the great-grandfather of my Grandma, someone her dad Clyde Banta Barbour knew. And my father knew Clyde. I orient myself in the Barbour family tree by how people were related to Myron. This is Part I of Family, Fort Wayne and Forgotten Stories: The Life of Myron Barbour .             M artha Phelps Barber faced grim prospects by the summer of 1779. Widowed at 43 with eight children sixteen years old and under, she’d been left with a modest estate of a little over 100 pounds. That was bad enough. But the estate was ...

    An ad for the short-lived trolley park in Dearing, Kansas It must have seemed almost like a dream. It was there…and then gone so fast, vanished. A glittering amusement park in Dearing, Kansas, with a thousand incandescent lights, a roller coaster with seven cars lit by 300 lights, a merry-go-round with 150 lights, the penny arcade, a bowling alley, a dance pavilion, billiards room, a pool hall, and band shell. There was the German Village where one could go for refreshments, and the moving picture show. You never knew what you might see, but the ads promised “Something doing all the time.”       You might be able to watch glass blowers, Professor Montz Bozarth making a balloon ascension; Captain Calvert making a high dive; or have your fortune read for free. One might encounter the thin man, “who answers all questions.” Or maybe you’d be there when Professor LePondo, the hypnotist, was buried aliv...