Jan Cubic fondly remembers visiting her grandparents in the Burdick neighborhood. Now those visits, and more, have turned into her first book, “Burdick: Where the Trains Once Stopped.”
Today, Burdick Road still leads to where the train depot once stood.
“I think Burdick is a beautiful area,” Cubic said. “My grandparents lived there. They lived at the corner right below the railroad,” from the 1940s to 1980s.
“The train depot and all that was gone long before I went to my grandparents’ house,” she said. “The train depot moved to Chesterton, and they stopped the one in Burdick.”
Her grandparents’ house is the oldest existing house in the neighborhood, built in the 1880s, Cubic said. “It was a very primitive house. I always loved it.”
The Burdick area prospered after Chicago’s Great Fire on Oct. 8, 1871. AC Burdick had a contract with the railroads to supply lumber from his sawmill, and it was needed in great quantity to rebuild Chicago. “That made the area really prosper,” Cubic said.
Burdick’s history includes another bit of railroad history — Woodrow Wilson’s presidential car. Dr. William Rice, who formerly ran the dental school at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., bought that car and used it as a weekend house for many years.
“He was known by everybody as Major Rice,” Cubic said.
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She recalls seeing that car on the lake every Sunday when she went by but didn’t know the background. The story came to life. “My mom and her siblings as kids would play on that railroad car at night while it was on the street,” being moved bit by bit from the railroad to its new location for the Rices, who had a house on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
Rice had a natural preserve on his property. “He had deer and antelope, bears and swans, all on his property,” Cubic said. “He was an interesting character.”
Rice also had 3,000 minks on the mink farm, but that’s not all. “They had a heated swan house, so they had swans throughout the year.”
“Now there’s houses developed back in there, but it’s still gorgeous,” Cubic said.
“It was always kind of on my bucket list to do a book,” Cubic said. She retired in 2022 as a librarian in Pina County, Arizona. She still lives there, but Burdick has a nostalgic pull on her.
“After I retired, I promised myself I would do at least one book,” she said.
Writing about Burdick meant honoring her grandparents, so she began researching, a process that took about 10 years. That included working by email with Porter County Historian Serena Ard, who also serves as curator of the Westchester Township History Center, and two trips back to Porter County to comb through records.
“You’d lose so much history if you didn’t have a local newspaper,” Cubic said.
Jackson Township Trustee Jan Meyers was also helpful.
“There’s a lot of families still there that are quite old, historically,” Cubic said.
“My family, my aunts and uncles all live there, my cousins live there. A lot of them live on Burdick Road,” she said.
Malcom Anderson did a lot of interviews, and they’re on file at the Westchester Township History Center. Those were very helpful.
The Anderson home was built in 1899, and the family still owns that property.
Pat Jackson’s great-grandparents built a house in Burdick, and Jackson’s grandparents built a Sears Roebuck kit home on that property.
Burdick had a post office at one time. Actually, three times; it was a three different locations. “The finish was at my grandparents’ house,” Cubic said.
For people who grew up in Burdick, or visited grandparents there, a staple memory is Ben Wood General Store, 475 E. Burdick Road. It stood there for 77 years, though it closed in the 1970s.
Cubic reminisced about walking into that store, “a little store that smelled like oil and wood and tobacco. You go in and there’s this long glass case of candy, and Ben Wood was always there to greet you.”
A friend she grew up with had a step-grandpa who was an original owner before Ben Wood. That friend always went there to buy Bazooka bubble gum.
Cubic said a friend told her the story reminded her of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café,” minus the barbecue ribs.
“Independence was having money in your pocket and going to the store by yourself,” Cubic said. Having 7 cents meant being able to buy a Popsicle.
“We all went to Ben’s. Everybody knew Ben.”
Cubic told of an elderly aunt who lived in an apartment over the general store when she was in her 20s. “I didn’t even know people rented rooms there,” Cubic said.
“My cousin Artie, who’s now 80, my aunt who’s 100 would tell about Artie riding his bike down the road to his grandparents’ house.”
“It was kind of a trip down memory lane,” Cubic said.
The book is self-published through Amazon, $13.50 for a 169-page paperback book.
Researching the book, off and on, took a decade, but writing it was a grueling month.
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After a final trip to Chesterton last year, Cubic sat down to write. “This is it, no matter what,” she decided.
Her husband, a retired military man and law enforcement officer, was her editor. He wasn’t easy on her.
“We would go over it and over again,” Cubic said. “I’d work on a chapter and put it aside and go back and forth,” getting it just right.
The audience might seem limited, focused on a tiny area in Northwest Indiana, but Cubic said it’s a good read that should appeal to “anybody who enjoys the old, small-town story.”
“My husband is not from there, and he loved reading it,” she said.
With that book completed, Cubic is working on a book about the history of the area where she lives, including the open pit copper mine.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.