Slightly Off the Mark: June 2026

To help celebrate this year's Chain O' Lakes Festival in Albion, I thought I'd post some photos from previous festivals. (As always, this is Indiana--there are at least three more Chains Of Lakes that I know of in other states, in addition to the dozen or so Albions.)

The original celebration was called the Albion Street Fair because, well, there was no Chain O' Lakes State Park. This photo even calls it the "Lawn Street Fair", and as you can see, the Noble County Courthouse lawn is being well used. A few years ago, someone used a metal detector to find a few coins there that might well have fallen from some of the pictured people's punctured pants pockets.

What does one do at a street fair in the early 1900s? Well, you could watch the Mars Duo, a pair of acrobats who seem unfairly low to the ground. The building behind them was the Worden House, a hotel that was later moved in pieces to become homes. One of those homes may have been haunted, according to my research for Haunted Noble County, Indiana. The gas station most of us Old Timers call the Corner Stop stands there now.

At one point Albion's Street Fair happened in September ... or maybe it was a second town festival? It's not like people were home watching The Price is Right. The truth is, I can't trace the lineage of the original town celebrations directly to today's festival until after these older photos were taken.

But there were still rides--the Merry Go Round and the Ferris Wheel, for instance.

As you can see if you read sideways, the Ferris wheel photo was taken in 1909. There were three photographers operating in Albion at the time that I know of: Joseph M. Harkless, John Inbody, who worked out of Ekhart, and M. C. Beck. Harkless passed away in 1909, so these probably weren't his. In any case, a lot of photos were taken around Albion that year.

Then there were the Chain O' Lakes Festival parades, of course. I hate the word problematical, so for this Campfire Girls photo I'll just stick with "politically incorrect". I'm guessing it was taken in the 20s, but it's a pretty wild guess.

In any case, it wouldn't be a parade without horses. We're jumping forward some for this photo, which is from the Grace Leatherman collection, as is the next one.

More forward jumping brings us to this photo. The photographer had a bad habit of not writing down dates and should probably be whipped for it, but I think I took it in the late 80s. 1980s. Which, my aching body tells me, makes it awfully close to historical.

I've posted this last one before, but I added it now because it's one of the few parade photos I know of that actually has me in it. I was a last minute replacement for the Color Guard, and had absolutely no idea what I was doing--that's me on the right, shouldering an ax in a way I usually wouldn't.

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