A Family Connection, Spotted in a 1930s Photo

 We love this photo because it captures the spirit of a bygone era: French Lick Springs Hotel in the 1930s, when guests were fully decked out in suits and ties, fur coats, dresses and hats, passing the time by rocking on the veranda and reading the newspaper.

A couple of our recent guests love this photo for another reason: some of these people in the photo are family.

It’s amazing what personal connections you might stumble on when you see historic photos of our hotels. (One guest a few years ago even found himself in a 1950s-era photo hanging on the wall of the room he was staying in.) And recently in October, four siblings who visited French Lick Springs Hotel together made a surprise discovery also.

Prior to their visit, one of the siblings, Sue Tull, was perusing one of our blogs highlighting some of the classic snapshots throughout the hotel’s 175-year history. One of the black-and-white images instantly grabbed her attention.

“I scrolled down, saw it, and thought it looked a little like our ancestors. Pulled it in close and said, ‘That is them.’ Because we had been around our great-great aunt Anna, and we knew it was her and (her family). Very excited to see that.”

The four ladies on the far left in the photo, all with legs crossed the same way, are Emma Wurster Steele, Dora Wurster, Clara Wurster and Anna Wurster. Emma, seated far left, is their great grandmother and the other three ladies are great-great aunts.

Sue’s mother had actually told her about the photo before, as she had visited French Lick Springs Hotel in the past and saw it hanging up. But as the photos displayed on the wall are changed out periodically, Sue didn’t see the photo during the couple times she had visited.

“We believed our mother and aunts that it really existed, but we had never seen it.”

The four siblings, recreating the veranda pose in 2020: William Wilson, Victoria Coltharp, Janet Hallas and Sue Tull. (With the same stoic expressions as their ancestors.)

The four siblings — Sue and Janet both from Lafayette, Indiana, Victoria from Mississippi and William from Oklahoma — always try to meet up once a year. When they decided on French Lick for this year’s outing, one of William’s first items of business was to search the halls for the photo. And he spotted it outside a meeting room on the mezzanine above the lobby.

We believe the photo is from 1930, which would have been during the Great Depression. But the ladies were well-off and could afford to travel, as their great-grandmother’s husband had a prominent position at a steel, wire and iron company in Lafayette.

The ladies in this snapshot were between 49 and 59 at the time of the photo, and we learned a little more about them, too.

The three sisters never married. They also had a brother Charlie, but he didn’t travel with the girls. All were college educated, which was unusual for that era. Anna even studied abroad in Paris and was later a French professor at Purdue University. Clara was a fantastic artist, and today, Victoria owns some of Clara’s hand-painted china and a hand-carved mahogany bench that was passed through the generations.

After the siblings retraced their ancestors’ steps almost 90 years later — walking where they walked and rocking where they rocked on the veranda — they’re hopeful that French Lick Springs Hotel is a tradition that trickles down more generations.

“I think our kids and grandkids would love it, too — the history and the connections,” Sue says. “It’d be neat to keep that going from that one photo.”