Locating Loper

Updates are always fun. 

Famous Fairfield buggymaker George Loper ran a business for most of a decade in the late 1870s and 1880s, and whether he competed with other carriage operations depends on the definition.

There were dozens of companies making wagons, carriages, carts, Phaetons and anything that needed to be pulled. The most notable ones were the Studebakers in South Bend and the McFarlane empire in Connersville.

It is Connersville where Loper's world gets interesting. Our 2015 essay on that is

HERE

We have learned where Loper set up his display room in Connersville in 1883 and where it was located 5 years later. The Huston Hotel at 4th and Central in Connersville was one of several such emporiums in the day, thriving as it would and entertaining a world of at least local substantive self-prominence.

No idea why Loper moved his business to a different spot, but he did. Marked on the map in yellow are the two major locations taken from a 1887 Sanborn map (Indiana University). 

The rest of this is more interesting for different reasons. The Connersville Times, in publishing news of Loper's death in March 1904, spared no sap.

"George Loper, of Fairfield, was called away from Earth last week, his funeral took place on Thursday. Verily the Shadowy Reaper has been busy in in the past year reaping the golden grain."

Theo. Dickerson penned these classic paragraphs.