Milford Township
Battey's county history of 1882 says Charles Cochran was twenty-one when he left this county for Iowa on foot, with less than four dollars. He came back on a horse he traded for at Galena, seven days on the road.
Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana, F.A. Battey & Co., 1882, printed page 249, scan leaf 253, via the Internet Archive.
How this county was settled, named, and argued over, read out of two county histories and a stack of insurance maps.
LaGrange County
The Post Office Department's 1909 map of LaGrange County draws its rural routes, eight offices that ran them, and the offices it had just closed. The register says twelve offices were open the day the sheet was finished. The sheet draws eleven.
Stroh
In 1982 the county remembered a fishing trip, marl on a man's shoes and a thousand barrels of cement a day. The state geologist had recorded four kilns able to make four hundred and eighty. The records go on to say how the works ended.
LaGrange County
In June 1832 two men came onto Magoquinan Prairie and warned of an attack set for the next evening. Families left their houses and slept in the woods. A Michigan officer wrote it down at the time, in a letter none of the county's histories used.
The people who put it here, and what the record kept about them.
Howe
In January of 1835 a lawyer at Lima wrote to Lewis Cass asking him to get this county a road to Chicago. Congress voted twenty thousand dollars for the survey. About half of it was spent, and nothing was ever built.
Wolcottville
George Wolcott came to the southern line of Johnson Township in March of 1837, built a log house, and went back for his family in September. The race that fed his first mill, he dug himself.
Wolcottville
O. B. Taylor clerked in the store the town was named for, went to the Indiana House twice, and was credited with a drainage law nobody can name. Three years after the county printed his portrait he left for California.
Where the money came from, who made it, and what it did to the towns.
Shipshewana
In 1970 a man in Shipshewana made a miniature horse-drawn wagon for his own enjoyment and it sold immediately. Sixteen years later, on the other side of the same street, a group of churches raised a barn because so many people were coming to town. Both of those are still there.
Shipshewana
The first thing Mel Riegsecker built to sell, he did not want to sell. He asked his father to price it out of reach. His father sold it, somebody wanted another, and fifty-six years later the family runs eight businesses in a town of eight hundred and thirty-nine people.
Shipshewana
Shipshewana gained thirty-eight people between 1920 and 1950 and lost some of them along the way. Then it gained a hundred and thirty-six in a single decade and has never gone backward since. Something happened in the sixties.
What the county said it would teach, what it spent, and the rooms the children were actually in.
Bloomfield Township
A schoolhouse was drawn on a LaGrange County map in 1874 and left unnamed. In 1904 the township built two rooms and a hall in front of it and kept the old building as the back room, where it still stands.
Ontario
In the 1840s a district hired whoever would take the job, and paid them in corn. The fix was to gather teachers up and teach them how to teach. This county has been saying for a hundred and forty years that it went first, and nobody has ever been able to say who did it.
Eden Township
The first schools in this county were log rooms with slabs for desks and no chimney. The teachers were paid ten dollars a month, or two bushels of corn a week, or ten shillings, and they lived in the houses of the families whose children they taught.
39 sheets of this county, drawn between 1852 and 1925. Two atlases with every landowner named township by township, four sheets from the Library of Congress, three lakes sounded to the foot, and this one, which two men in LaGrange drew and copyrighted in 1904.
The 1904 Map of La Grange County by Shepardson and Rerick, lithographed by W. Wangersheim, Chicago. Map Collection, Indiana Division, Indiana State Library.
50 view and portrait plates from the two atlases and the 1882 county history, whole and uncropped, with every name on them taken from the books' own lists rather than read off the picture. The court house, the schools, the mills and most of the faces this county has.
Illustrated Atlas and Columbian Souvenir of LaGrange County, Indiana, LaGrange Publishing Company, 1893, leaf 19. Public domain.
Samuel Durant drew this in August of 1874, four years after the first railroad reached LaGrange. Eleven townships, every section numbered, one railway running north to south. The county had been organised for forty-two years and had another nineteen before its own chronicles stopped.
Map of La Grange County, Indiana, compiled and drawn by S. W. Durant, August 1874, from the Illustrated Historical Atlas of LaGrange County, Andreas and Baskin, Chicago. Leaf 16, printed page 12, via the Internet Archive.
Eleven townships. The count is where a piece is chiefly set, so a town straddling two townships is counted once.
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