Anna Long Hoard stood beside her dying husband at Lutheran Hospital,
numb with grief and disbelief. Two days earlier, Kellis Hoard had been
a robust and healthy man of 62. Now, he lay dying because of a careless
Unsteady, Anna grasped the metal bed frame, in fear exhaustion would
cause her to pass out. Thoughts of life without Kellis swept over her in
waves. In their 37 years of marriage, they rarely spent a night apart. Anna
was uncertain how she could live without her husband.
Kellis, whose full name was Henry Kellis Hoard, worked on land that
had been in Anna’s family since her grandparents Reuben and Elizabeth
Long moved from Ohio in the 1830s. Most farmers’ wealth and
livelihood were secured in their legacy land, intended to sustain them,
their children, and their children’s children. But the Hoards had no sons,
and their daughters had moved away.
The Hoards, their neighbors, and most Hoosiers had struggled with
finances since the end of World War I. Farmers had produced
government-requested excess crops for the war effort. When the war
ended, farm prices crashed. The reward for a farmer’s patriotism was
excess grain he couldn’t sell and storage fees at the local elevator. Out
of necessity, Kellis and Anna obtained a mortgage loan of $4,000 in
1922. Farm prices stayed low throughout the 1920s.
Kellis took a second job for extra income at Perry Yoder’s store, a
stone’s throw from the farm. Yoder found him a considerable asset—
Kellis knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Kellis supported 4-H
Clubs, the Whitley County Fair, and was an officer for the Farmers’
Elevator and the local Farm Bureau. He was always the first in line to
help a neighbor or his community.
Now the community’s good neighbor was in trouble.
In winter, farmers gathered at Yoder’s Store on weekday afternoons. In
heavy-weight bib overalls, men hashed over politics, grain prices, and
spring planting. The store was a jumble of products, soaps, medicines,
notions, ammunition, fishing tackle, fertilizer components, and penny
nails. Stacked cases of everything from tomato soup to hammers dotted
the wooden floors. Yoder kept spittoons for his customers near the black
pot-bellied stove in the front room. Between spitting part of their chaw
and telling tall tales, the men snuck into the storeroom for a taste of
home-brew. What Prohibition outlawed in 1919—bootleg whiskey,
hooch, hard cider, moonshine—was available all over Whitley County.
Men slipped into the dimly-lighted storeroom for a nip of hard cider
from the solitary jug always on the counter.
Kellis, an occasional tippler, grabbed the jug in the storeroom. Every
man in the store had snuck into the backroom for a nip at one time or
another. Kellis hoisted the familiar stoneware container and took a swig
from its tiny, rounded mouth.
What he tasted was nothing like what he expected. The drink burned his
mouth and throat, fiery hot, like lightning blazing through ripe standing
He shoved the jug aside and stumbled back into the front room,
triggering the attention of the men crowded around the pot-bellied
stove. Something was very wrong.
All eyes in the crowded front room turned to Kellis, bent double. His
neighbors lay Kellis on the floor.
A quarter of a mile down Tunker Road, Anna’s kitchen warmed the
entire downstairs as she prepared dinner for her husband and the hired
man. Anna removed the bread from her wood stove, placing the fragrant
loaves to cool on her Hoosier cabinet. Tonight’s dinner would be hearty;
Kellis would be chilly, even after his walk home.
The wooden party line telephone, hanging on the kitchen wall, rang—
two longs, two shorts.
“Anna, come to the store; your husband has had an accident,” an
unknown voice shouted into the phone and hung up.
What accident could happen at the store, Anna thought. Like all farmers,
Kellis faced many dangers—a limb catching in equipment, a bucking
horse, or tripping into a hole. What farmer had not encountered a
poisonous snake or two in the haymow or a cornfield? Farm life was
But the store? Kellis ran the cash register, unloaded boxes from delivery
trucks, and counted inventory. None of what Anna had heard on the
phone made sense. Anna pulled on a barn coat over her housedress and
grabbed her galoshes. She would not leave the house dressed in work
clothes under ordinary circumstances. These were hardly normal
circumstances; Anna ran the quarter-mile down Tunker Road to the
A neighbor stood in icy puddles near the store, waiting for her. He
shouted, “Kellis drank something that might have been poison.”
Anna entered through the double wooden doors and saw a crush of men
hovering over someone on the floor. Kellis was moaning and writhing
in pain, lying on the plank floor between crates of tomato soup and
Neighbors carried Kellis, trembling in agony, through the store into
someone’s truck. Another man ran back into the storeroom and grabbed
the jug Kellis drank from, corking the top so the remaining liquid
wouldn’t drain out. Maybe the fluid could be identified at the hospital.
Onlookers, talking in low voices and shaking their heads, flocked
outside, watching the truck and its injured passenger head towards the
county seat. The neighbor drove Anna and Kellis ten miles to the nearest
hospital in Columbia City.
Anna held her husband’s hand and wiped his brow. She asked the driver
about the jug in the storeroom. The neighbor said no one had any idea
what had happened. It was so odd no one at the store became ill.
Physicians at Columbia City sent Kellis by ambulance to the Lutheran
Hospital. The larger, better equipped Fort Wayne hospital was only 20
miles away, but icy roads slowed the trip. Still in her housedress, Anna
rode with her husband in the back of the ambulance.
At the hospital, she held a vigil at her husband’s side for hours as he
weaved in and out of consciousness. Doctors gave Anna little hope for
Kellis’s recovery. Even at the highest recommended dose, morphine
barely relieved his suffering. He could not swallow pills; his throat and
stomach burned. Nurses injected him with their most potent opioid
every two hours, but the shots only skimmed the surface of the pain
from his throat and below.
Anna dozed in fits and starts in a chair near her husband’s hospital bed
on Wednesday night. Did she dream of other losses as she worried about
her husband? Did she think of their middle daughter, Mae, who died in
a car accident a decade earlier? Did she dream of her brother, Franklin,
lost in a farm accident when Anna was a teenager?
Anna awoke to find her oldest daughter, Zoe Hoard, leaning over
Kellis’s bed. Zoe, an elementary school principal, left near dawn for the
90-minute drive to Fort Wayne from South Bend. Anna was grateful to
see her eldest child. Zoe was the organizer, the peacemaker, the
LeNore Enz, the younger daughter, arrived later Thursday from
Springfield, Illinois, drained from travel. Unlike her older, more practical
sister, LeNore could be frantic and disorganized. Anna was comforted
by both daughters’ presence, even though they sometimes fought as
Carl Enz, LeNore’s husband, had loaded their Buick with clothes and
the couple’s two daughters on Wednesday evening. The family drove
more than 300 miles in wintry weather on poor roads. After leaving
LeNore at the Fort Wayne hospital, Carl went to his parents’ house on
Alabama Street, ready for rest and help with his daughters, Donna Enz,
four, and Marilyn Enz, an infant.
Kellis continued his life-and-death struggle Thursday night. Anna stood
at her husband’s bedside with her daughters when the doctor called
Kellis’s death at 5:35 a.m., Friday, not 48 hours after the accident.
LeNore, a registered nurse, helped the attending nurse pull the sheet
over Kellis’s face. LeNore had trained as a nurse at Lutheran Hospital
graduating in 1929. The small act of drawing the sheet over her father
devastated LeNore. She adored her father. And she had been Kellis’s
favorite, an open secret in the family.
A hospital pharmacist identified the jug’s contents as sulphuric acid, an
ingredient in fertilizer, corrosive enough to put holes in the stomach,
cause blindness, and severely burn the throat and esophagus. The death
certificate listed as cause of death “edema of the glottis” and “stricture
of the esophagus” and noted Kellis accidentally drank sulphuric acid
mistaken for cider—a euphemism for alcohol. Why the unlikely
poisoning happened remains a mystery.
Anna and her daughters soon busied with funeral details, with South
Whitley’s Miller and Pook Funeral Home handling the arrangements.
Kellis would be laid to rest at Eberhard Lutheran Church, near their
daughter Mae. Thoughts of standing beneath a tent at the cemetery gave
Anna a chill. How could she stand to watch her husband’s casket drop
into the ground so near the grave of their dear Mae?
Anna couldn’t help but think of her father, gone such a short time. She
wished Washington Long were still alive so she could hold his steady
arm at the funeral and committal. On Sunday, she would witness the
burial of her husband, one of the two most important men in her life.
Anna had enjoyed a close relationship with her father. Anna and
Washington always depended on each other for strength. Now both
these men were gone from her life.
Despite her small stature, Anna possessed a sizeable toughness and
fortitude unmatched by others. The new widow knew she could and
would draw on the love and strength from her husband and father,
forever held in her heart.
Visiting Eberhard always elicited memories. Eberhard Cemetery was
familiar ground, only four miles from the farm, and the family’s final
resting place for generations. The first of Anna’s family in the county,
Reuben Long and Elizabeth Olinger Long, were buried close to the
church. Anna’s great-grandmother Catherine Hiestand Long, came to
Whitley County in the late 1840s and was buried there in 1870. Anna’s
brother Franklin Long was buried near her parents.
On Sunday, Anna, flanked by her daughters, walked from the funeral
service at Eberhard Lutheran Church to her husband’s open grave in the
adjacent cemetery. The west wind was brisk over the open fields across
Keiser Road, and snowflakes spit periodically from a gray sky.
A familiar sight—Washington’s oversized red marble tombstone—
forced a smile from Anna. Dead for 18 months, he made his daughter
chuckle on one of the worst days of her life. That Washington Long
purchased a huge marker seemed right in character for her larger-than life
father. While his height was average, his character was colossal. No
one walking to the gravesite could miss Washington Long’s sizeable
tombstone at the edge of Keiser Road, a towering piece of marble in
The wind whipped around the grave markers, and the funeral home tent
provided little respite for the mourners. Arms still linked, Anna and her
daughters stood for the brief committal service. Kellis’s s iblings and
their children huddled behind the women, and neighbors and friends
crowded around the family. Reverend N. C. McCoy of Columbia City
gave the final blessing, and Kellis’s casket was lowered into the ground.
Amid grief and anxiety, Anna
wasn’t sure how she would
move forward. She and Kellis
dreamed of their remaining
children living on the farm, but
neither daughter expressed
interest. Zoe wasn’t married
and had a career. LeNore’s
husband Carl was a rising star
for Prudential in Springfield,
Illinois. Who would cherish
the farm, now and in the
The legacy farm had meant survival for Anna’s ancestors. Anna was born
in her father’s home, where he had also been born. She gave birth to her
three children in her own home, on adjacent land. The farm was her
means of support and her link to the pioneer past. Anna wanted her
children to experience the joys and assets of the land.
For now, the Hoards’ hired man could keep the fieldwork going, with
Anna managing the large vegetable garden, the beehives, a dairy cow,
and chickens. Those efforts did not solve the problem of the monthly
loan payment. Kellis’s wages from the store supplemented budget
shortfalls due to low crop prices and the Depression.
As Anna and her daughters huddled at Eberhard Cemetery on a
December 1932 afternoon, the farm had been in the family for 95 years.
The fertile Washington Township land had sustained the family and
provided security in difficult times. The Longs and their descendants
worked against harsh winters, drought, disease, economic upheaval, and
The farm was Anna’s rock.
She had no intention of losing it now.