Скачать или смотреть Birthplace Of Indian Motocycle : Part 3

The house in Portland, Connecticut where Oscar Hedstrom lived from 1911 until his death in 1960. Portland is a small town directly across the Connecticut river from Middletown, where Hedstrom built the first Indian motorcycle in 1901. I found the following article at 'Portland Online'. I cut out most of the non-Hedstrom info...

The John Worthington House
by Doris Sherrow

The large, white colonial-shaped house at 533 Main Street was built between 1842 and 1845 by a Haddam man, John Isham Worthington... (edit)

...Carl Oscar Hedstrom had come with his family from Sweden when he was nine years old. Early on, his dad gave him a bike, which he treasured. At sixteen, he took a job at a watch factory, and soon rose to the status of toolmaker.
This mechanical talent also expressed itself in his hobby, building racing bicycles. His 1960 obituary stated, "Hedstrom... was regarded as one of the best riders of the day, appearing in the old Madison Square Garden and other arenas." In 1901, he joined Hendee Manufacturing Company, the Springfield, Massachusetts manufacturer that produced the Indian Motorcycle, once the fierce competitor of Harley Davidson. His inventions pushed the Indian from a bicycle with a motor on it, to a smooth-moving, efficient device for traveling - fast! By 1913, Hendee Manufacturing was the world's top producer of motorcycles.
But Hedstrom left Hendee in 1913. One of his race driver friends had been killed, plus there was friction in the company over whether to strive for progress or profit. Hedstrom favored progress; the investors wanted only profit.
In 1911, the Hedstroms had purchased the beautiful Worthington house in Portland. With the Indian motorcycle no longer his main concern, Oscar went to work on the house. The 1927 tax assessor's card for the house at 533 Main Street says, "remodeled 1913."
When Gail Porteus and I were researching the Portland History and Architecture book for the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust in 1979, we had a wonderful conversation with Helen Carlson, Oscar and Julia Hedstrom's daughter. Mrs. Carlson showed us old pictures and told us great stories about her childhood in the beautiful house.
She remembered vividly how her father had remodeled the house when she was a young girl. A pre-1913 photograph showed the three-bay, gable-to-street Greek Revival part on the right side, with a two-story rear ell protruding, ridge-to-street, from the back of the left side.
Hedstrom, never one to fear an engineering challenge, had had the original gable-to-street roof lifted off the Greek Revival style main block, rotated 90 degrees, and extended further to the north to cover a front room on the north side of the house! The result was a handsome imitation of the two-story, five-bay colonial house.
During the remodeling, the Hedstrom family--little Helen and her parents--camped in three rooms, while carpenters swarmed about them, Helen told us with a laugh!
Unlike his hard-driving predecessor William Andrews (the house's previous owner who died in an early car crash), Oscar Hedstrom survived to the age of 89. Even after his resignation, he was still called on to solve mechanical problems with various Indian motorcycles. Helen, the Hedstroms' only surviving child, married Town Clerk David Carlson in 1930, a year after he had built the house at 535 Main, on the northwest corner of her parents' large lot.