Not enough travel for two roads

He was twenty-one and he had been here two years.

John Howe had come out from Boston by way of Detroit, read law in Michigan offices for a year, and picked this county on purpose because it sat between two rivers. He taught its first school in 1833, in a log house southeast of Lima, for ten or twelve dollars a month.

And in January of 1835 he wrote to Lewis Cass.

---

What Howe wanted from General Cass was a road. The county history gives him that rank and no more, and it demonstrates his weight a different way: Howe asked, and the appropriation passed.

Toledo was a village called Vistula at the time. The idea was a through highway from Vistula to Chicago, and the county history is blunt about what it would have meant.

An effort was early made to open a through highway from Vistula to Chicago, which, if it had been built, would in all probability have passed through the county, and have made its history in development and population greatly different from what it is.

Howe wrote asking for Cass's influence, and he got it. Between Cass and General Tipton, one of Indiana's senators, Congress appropriated twenty thousand dollars for the survey on the third of March, 1835, which was Howe's twenty-second birthday.

About ten thousand of it was spent laying the road out.

...but this was the first and the last money expended on it.

---

The reason it stopped is one sentence and it is the best thing in the county's history.

It was thought then too late to divert the travel from the Detroit line, and that there would not be enough travel for two roads !

The exclamation mark is the county historian's, writing in 1882, by which time the answer was obvious.

There was one further reason, and it had nothing to do with this county: the heavily timbered land and stiff clay soil west of Maumee Bay were discouraging to build through.

---

So the travel stayed on the Detroit line, and the county sat and watched it go past.

The 1882 history puts the geography plainly.

La Grange County, though on the direct line for travel from New York to Chicago, and thus on the travel belt around the world, was unfortunately missed by the east and west thoroughfares first established, and is even yet.

Detroit and Chicago were the first important posts in the northwest, the travel set in between them, the stage lines followed, and they struck the counties to the west.

---

What the county had instead was wagons.

The Fort Wayne road was authorised in 1832 and the viewers reported that November, and for close to forty years nearly all the surplus grain went out over it and nearly all the merchandise came in. Wheat at Fort Wayne was worth forty or fifty cents a bushel, and one man recorded in his own sketch that he had marketed wheat there at fifty cents when the trip took him three days.

Before the canal reached Fort Wayne in 1843, some of them went further. A Milford settler and his family went to Toledo with an ox team to buy groceries, and the round trip took twenty-one days.

When a Lima merchant opened the best store the town had yet seen in 1837, with twenty thousand dollars of stock, it came from New York by the Erie Canal to Buffalo, by vessel to Michigan City, and then by wagon. The freight bill alone was three thousand dollars.

---

Howe did other things in those years and they are worth listing.

He sat in the state legislature in 1840, representing Steuben, DeKalb, Noble and LaGrange counties together. He kept practising law. He wrote four books on political economy and finance. In 1853 he went into a private bank at Lima with Samuel P. Williams, the merchant whose store had brought twenty thousand dollars of goods here by canal and wagon sixteen years before. Ford says it was the first bank between Fort Wayne and South Bend.

He also had a grandfather worth mentioning, because the county history mentions him. Stephen Badlam was a brigadier general of militia who joined the Colonial army in 1775, and as a major of artillery took a point on the fourth of July 1776 that was named Mount Independence for the occasion.

---

Then in 1850 the county got its second chance and he was not there. The Michigan Southern's chief engineer came to Lima to see him about the right of way and found him gone, and the road went north through Michigan instead.

What he was doing instead is not nothing. He was at Indianapolis as this county's delegate to the convention that wrote Indiana's constitution, and when the clause excluding black people from the state came up he spoke against it and voted against it, and lost. Both of those are pieces this archive has already written. What neither of them says is that the man who had spent fifteen years trying to get a route through this county was three hundred miles away when the route arrived. The record puts the two facts in two different chapters and never sets them together.

---

Fifteen years apart, the same man, and the same result twice.

In 1835 he got a congressional appropriation and the road was never built. In 1850 the engineer came to his door and he was not behind it.

The county history says of the railroad that had it come, the towns would now be much larger than they are and the population at least one-half more. It says of the highway that it would have made the county's history in development and population greatly different from what it is.

Two counterfactuals, both in the same volume, both about roads that did not come, and the same man is in both stories.

---

He stayed anyway, for fifty years. At the courthouse cornerstone in 1878 he stood up and said he supposed he was the only person there who had settled in the county as early as 1833, and nearly a dozen hands went up to say otherwise.

He died in 1883, and what he left founded a school and the school renamed the town.

So the road he wrote for was never built, the railroad came to somebody else's town, and the place he chose in 1833 because it sat between two rivers is named after him.

---