Wherever duty has called them

They came in the late eighteen thirties, and no source says exactly when.

Philo Taylor was past forty, born in Connecticut, and he brought his wife Orabell and six children out of Portage County, Ohio, to the LaGrange side of a place that was not yet a town. The third son was ten years old when they left. His initials were O. B., and almost nobody in the county's record ever wrote out what they stood for.

The arithmetic gives 1837 or 1838. The county's chronologies put the removal of the Potawatomi in 1837 and have Philo Taylor building the first schoolhouse at Wolcottville the year after.

He was educated at the Collegiate Institute at Ontario, which was the nearest thing to a college this county had. At seventeen he started teaching a district school and kept at it three years.

Then he went to work in George Wolcott's store.

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That store is the reason Wolcottville is called Wolcottville, and he was standing in it in 1851 when Wolcott wrote to Vermont for a schoolteacher.

He stayed until the spring of 1852, then went to South Milford and opened his own place. Seven years later he married Catharine Henry, daughter of a man who had represented this county in the legislature, and moved back to Wolcottville that October to trade under the name of Wildman and Taylor.

In 1867 the firm became O. B. and H. L. Taylor, which is him and his younger brother. He sold out to O. L. Woodruff, then bought his brother's interest back, and the name on the door ended as O. L. Woodruff and Company.

Around the same time the Masonic lodge at Wolcottville was founded and he was its treasurer. Ford dates it to the twenty-sixth of July, 1867, and names sixteen charter members with Taylor as the first treasurer. Battey dates it to May of 1868 and names six. Neither book can be called the error.

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By 1882 he held two hundred and seventy acres of good land near the town, and town property besides.

He had a wife, three sons and an adopted daughter, and he was still the lodge's treasurer.

His father is the one Battey calls one of the most influential in building up the town, and the one it gives many positions of honor and several terms as county commissioner. The son gets the acreage and the firms.

And in 1878 the county elected him to the Indiana House.

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He was re-elected two years later with an increased majority, and his brother went in with him.

V. R. Taylor was elected in 1880 from the Noble County side of Wolcottville, so for two years one family from one town had two men in the legislature at once. The county history says O. B. was a hard-working member, chairman of important committees, and that he served with distinction and satisfaction to his constituents.

Then it credits him with a law.

He was instrumental in the adoption of the Ditch or Drainage Law.

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That law would have mattered here more than almost anywhere, because this county was mostly water.

The great problem, Battey says, was how to get rid of the surplus water standing in the vast bogs. He writes that in the Eden Township chapter, a few sentences after finishing with the Haw Patch, which is the best ground in the county and sits in the same township as the worst of the water. The first attempt was a state ditch cut through the Big Marsh. A little before 1850 a man named Johnston Latta began the first private ditching, against considerable discouragement from his neighbours, and the surveyors who came to lay the lines had a hard time of it in the trackless and bottomless bogs and among the poison sumach.

Then the county's own historian, in one clause, on how it went.

Since then, considerable attention has been paid to the drainage of the marshes, under the various laws of the State ; and it has perhaps resulted in as much litigation as drainage.

Both of the county's chronologies mark 1881 as the year it started in earnest. Ford's says many ditches begun under the new drainage law. The 1893 atlas says many ditches begun under the new ditch law.

Taylor was in his second term.

Neither chronology names him, and no source anywhere names the statute he is credited with, or gives its date, or a line of what it said. Two biographies give him a phrase and two chronologies give the year, and nothing in the record joins them.

By 1890 the atlas could count what had gone into the ground: forty-five thousand eight hundred and five rods of drain tile in operation, which is about a hundred and forty miles of it. By the time Ford wrote in 1920 the work had changed the county's shape. Lakes reduced and some gone altogether, Buck Lake drained, the water power at Flint destroyed so the mill had to go to steam, and one man in the county running ten steam dredges that had taken out millions of cubic yards.

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In 1882 the county history printed his portrait.

Twenty-four men and women got a plate in that volume, lithograph busts, each with a facsimile of the sitter's signature engraved beneath it. Most of them are farmers. His is at printed page eighty-seven, and it says O B Taylor over the word WOLCOTTVILLE.

Three years later he left.

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The 1893 atlas gives him a second sketch, and it is the only source that follows him out of the county.

He moved to Tulare, California, in 1885. He was married to Catherine, daughter of Francis Henry. She died in California in 1889, and his son Frank in 1891. He has living one son, Albert H., a physician at San Francisco.

Of the three sons the 1882 book listed, one was already dead when it was printed. Frank died six years after they went west. Albert became a doctor in San Francisco. Catharine Henry, whose father had sat in the same legislature her husband did, is buried three thousand miles from the county she married in.

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After that the record stops following him.

Ford's history came out in 1920 and has no sketch of him. His name appears once in nine hundred pages, on the roll of the lodge he helped charter. The second volume of that work is nothing but biography and does not carry him at all.

In the county's list of its representatives he is there twice, 1878 and 1880, and then the list moves on. James Smith in 1883. In 1885, his own brother-in-law.

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While he was here, the books were not restrained about the family.

The 1882 volume runs to four hundred and five biographies and the middle one is two hundred and fifty-one words long. The Taylor entry is nine hundred and twenty-eight, the third longest in the county.

Some of that is how it was set. Four Taylors share one headword where four farmers would have four entries, so the length is partly the printer's.

The honorific is not. Hon. appears five times in ten thousand lines of this county's biographies, and three of the five name a Taylor.

And the family entry ends on a sentence the book writes about nobody who farmed.

The family of Taylors are of a sterling type, and have made their mark wherever duty has called them.

Eleven years later, and eight years after he had gone, the atlas puts it in four words. His career was eminently successful.

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There is one more picture of this family, and it is a different kind of thing.

The 1893 atlas carries a photograph of Philo Taylor, the father, printed small on a page with two schoolhouses and a windmill. He had been dead since February of 1876, and the atlas says the portrait shows him as he was in his later days.

Battey drew its subjects and put a signature under every one this archive has read.

The atlas photographed them.

So what this county holds of the Taylors is a drawing of a son who left three years after it was printed, and a photograph of a father who had been in the ground seventeen years when it was.