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| Lori Fry, holding one of the mystery photos that led her from Oklahoma to French Lick. |
You know those mystery-in-a-box challenges that come delivered to your front door? Lori Fry found herself holding a real-life mystery-in-a-box.
Cracking the code guided her all the way from Oklahoma to
French Lick.
First, a little background. Lori is from Muskogee, Oklahoma and she’s
in the process of writing a book about her paternal grandmother’s brother,
Bert, who passed away in 1954 in an oil well explosion. When she was dying,
Lori’s grandmother told her: “Please promise me you will not forget my
beloved Bert.”
But she’d never heard her grandmother say more than three
words about Bert.
“She said everything you need to know is in these boxes in a
trunk. I had this trunk that said M.A.P., Orleans, Indiana. I thought,
who the heck in my family is from Orleans, Indiana? I thought we were all Okies,”
Lori says. “My head is just spinning at this point. I put it aside for a few
years.”
But then Lori cracked open the trunk again and leafed
through some of the photos and postcards inside.
Folks from Indiana would recognize it pretty easily as
French Lick Springs Hotel, because it still looks very similar 100 years ago to
now. But Lori had no clue what the building was or where it was located.
Nothing of that scale would have existed in Oklahoma at that time, since it had
just become an official state. In search of answers, Lori took the photos to
the genealogy department of her local library.
Lori handed the local historian the photo, and asked if that
building was somewhere in Oklahoma.
“She said no, but she hands this book to me and says, is that it? And it’s the postcard edition of the history of French Lick. It has a picture of the hotel on the front cover. That book helped me solve a hundred years of family genealogy mysteries.”
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| Lori got the chance during her visit to re-enact old family photos from her collection, including this one in the back of the hotel next to the iconic Pluto Spring House. Compare it to the vintage photo below, which has another smaller spring house in the background which has since been removed. |
At first, Lori’s thought was that French Lick Springs Hotel probably wasn’t still around, but maybe it’d be fun to visit Indiana to see where her ancestors once lived and the hotel once stood.
“A quick Google search…this place is still there?!” Lori
recalls with a laugh. “It was really exciting to find out that, hey, this is a
place I can go and visit, this is a place I can relive some history, have a
connection with.”
Lori discovered that part of her family was from Bedford and
Orleans, Indiana, dating back to the early 1800s. Lydia Ellen Phillips was a
widower who lost her first husband to typhoid fever, then left Indiana to make a claim in Oklahoma’s Cherokee strip
land run in 1893.
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| Mattie (Pace) Jones in the French Lick Springs Hotel gardens by the Pluto Spring. |
Earlier this summer, Lori jumped at opportunity to make the
600+ mile trek to French Lick — that once-mysterious building…in that
black-and-white photo…in the bottom of the trunk…where this crazy puzzle all
began.
“We were blown away. That place is so beautiful,” Lori says.
“This hotel has some serious history, and it’s crazy the amount of things that
happened there.”
And now Lori has a chapter of her own to add.