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Note: Henry was baptized as Wilhelm Heinrich Laut on 2/15/1851 at St. Paul's Lutheran Church. Natural father is recorded as Andrew W. McOuat, whom never married Henry's mother. Sponsors were Johann Reinhard Laut and Heinrich Bohrman, who eventually married Henry's mother. Henry lived with Reinhard and Louisa, and always referred to them as his parents.
In 1873, Henry and William Poppe started the business of Laut & Poppe, Groceries, Provisions, Produce & Poultry, located at 630 Fletcher Avenue, Indianapolis. The partnership dissolved in 1879. Henry rented out a rear room facing South College Street to a Mr. Kuehrmann who operated a stove repair and tin shop. About 1884, in settlement for delinquent rent, Kuehrmann transferred the business to Henry. Soon afterwards the firm H.W. Laut & Company was founded. By 1892, the firm was focused solely on the metal business.
H.W. Laut & Company was responsible for the metal work on numerous Indianapolis buildings, many of which have since been demolished: the Federal Building, the Majestic (Farm Co-op) building, Fletcher Place Methodist Church, I.O.O.F. building, the Athenaeum, the Chamber of Commerce building, Circle (Hilbert) Theater, the Indianapolis Athletic Club, as well as the corner roofs of the State House in Indianapolis.
Henry built his home at 316 South College Avenue in 1872. This two-story Italinate building is part of the Historic Fletcher Place preservation district. An 1893 publication titled "Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana" notes that Henry "is a sincere member of the German Lutheran Church; is a member of the school board of that church and was for eight years a trustee of that body. He was first elected to the city council in 1886 and has been four times elected, having served continuously since that time."
On 13 June 1889, with Allen F. Smith, applied for a patent for a "Gutter-Bracket", serial number 314,163. On 21 January 1890 received Letters Patent Number 419,724 for same.
In a phone conversation with Howard W. Laut on 2/1/2002, Howard documented a story told to him by his father, as follows: "One day, Carl (Henry's son) came home from school to find his father sitting in the living room with an old man who was crying. Carl went into the kitchen and asked his mother who the man was and why was he crying. Dorothea told him that the man was Henry's real father, and had come to ask Henry to forgive him for the way he had treated his mother; he was crying because Henry refused to forgive him." Carl was told to never repeat this incident to anyone else, and it wasn't until he was up in years did he tell Howard. Howard kept the family silence, never telling anyone else in the family this story until he told me.
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