Stroh
Thirty-five names
Published . Last updated .
Stroh existed because of a discovery.
Around 1900, according to the county history published in 1920, capitalists developed the marl beds in the southeastern corner of LaGrange County and found cement rock under them. The same book cannot agree with itself about who they were: its physical features chapter says Milwaukee, and its Milford Township chapter names Emil Stroh of Detroit and other stockholders of the Wabash Railroad Company, which is who the town is named for.
The town had been platted in September of 1899 as Hayward, by William Hayward, its proprietor, whose family had held that ground since the 1840s. It was legally renamed Stroh on the fifteenth of February, 1900.
The Milford Township chapter is the one that counts the works. Four small kilns in 1900 at six hundred barrels a day, six more in 1902 for eleven hundred, and in 1915 the whole original system torn out for three large kilns at two thousand. Seventy-five men. The physical features chapter of the same volume says hundreds.
By 1915 it was the newest town in the county, it had a cement plant, and it had no bank.
In June of that year a group of people met to organize one.
The bank's own account says they were a small group of Stroh area citizens organizing for a very new settlement in the southeast part of the county. The settlement was fifteen years old by then. What was new was the payroll.
They opened in November. The county history published in 1920 gives the date as the sixteenth, in a biography rather than in its chapter on banks, and it is the most precise date anywhere in the record.
Thirty-five people held the original stock, and the county history lists every one of them.
H. B. Lewis. Mrs. H. B. Lewis. Jacob Forst. Roscoe Conklin. Mrs. Roscoe Conklin. Samuel Stout. Mrs. Samuel Stout. Ralph Ousterhout. Eugene Goodsell. Emil Stroh. J. B. Hayward. A. E. Emmerson. M. S. Perkins. Homer H. Brown. W. C. Hayward. Jay A. Langley. J. A. Eatinger. Charles Eatinger. Nancy F. Reed. James F. Reed. Geothe Temple. White Brothers. Delbert Phillips. J. D. Bodley. R. B. Ford. Charles Green. F. N. Wilson. J. D. Perkins. Henry M. Diehm. Clyde Perkins. Flora A. Skelley. Esther Reinhart. Guy Spero. Helen E. Lovell. Roy Perkins.
Seven of those thirty-five are women. Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Conklin, Mrs. Stout, Nancy Reed, Flora Skelley, Esther Reinhart, Helen Lovell.
Indiana women could not vote in a general election until 1920.
Two other things in that list are worth stopping on.
Emil Stroh is on it. The man the town is named for put his money into the local bank alongside thirty-four other names, and the list does not say what any of them did for a living.
And four of the thirty-five are Perkins. M. S., J. D., Clyde, and Roy.
Roy Perkins was the cashier. He was born on a farm in Milford Township in August of 1881, taught school for thirteen years, was superintendent at South Milford for five of them and principal at Stroh for four, and then went into the bank. He and his three brothers owned the Stroh Grain Company together.
When the county history was compiled five years later, the board of directors had nine members and three of them were Perkins brothers.
The bank opened with more than thirty-five thousand dollars on its first day and seventy-two thousand within ninety days, according to its own account. By 1928 it held a quarter of a million.
Then the banks closed.
Every bank in the country shut in March of 1933 under the Bank Holiday, and reopened only when the government said it could. The bank's account of what happened next is short. It reopened without a major reorganization, first under a restricted license and then unrestricted. By the end of that year its resources were half what they had been in 1928.
It says no depositor lost a cent. That is the bank's own claim about itself and nothing here corroborates it.
The next year it went to LaGrange.
The state's financial institutions department wanted more capital. The bank raised it by selling a hundred shares at a hundred dollars each, and on the seventh of November, 1934, it opened an office in the county seat, in the building the National Bank had occupied at Detroit and Spring.
That office is now the headquarters.
The federal deposit record tells this backwards. It lists the LaGrange office as established on the sixteenth of July, 1934, and the Stroh office as a branch dating from the thirteenth of November. Read plainly, it says the bank was founded at the county seat and opened a branch in a small town four months later.
The opposite happened. Stroh was the bank. LaGrange was the branch. The federal dates record when each office entered the deposit insurance system, which was new that year, and not when either one opened its doors.
After that it kept going and mostly kept buying.
Topeka in 1937. Wolcottville in 1938. A million dollars in assets by 1939, ten million by 1960, fifty million by 1978. Angola in 1980, which is the first office outside the county. Howe in 1989. Shipshewana in 1991, eighty-four years after Hewlitt Davis organized a bank of the same name in that town.
Hamilton in 1995. Sturgis, Michigan, in 2003, the first outside the state. The First National Bank of Fremont bought in 2005. Millersburg in 2008. A second LaGrange office in 2019.
Twelve offices. A billion and a quarter in assets. Nineteen changes on the federal record since 1934 and not one of them is somebody acquiring it.
There were four banks called Farmers State Bank in this county when the 1920 history was written: at Shipshewana from 1907, South Milford from 1910, Stroh from 1915, and Topeka from 1918. The historian listed them on consecutive lines of the same table.
The Shipshewana one was organized in October of 1907 by Hewlitt Davis, whose mother Sarah had run the private bank there before him and whose father Hezekiah had founded both the bank and the town. Ford's chapter on the banks prints his name as Hewlett. There are nine banks of that name in Indiana today.
The one that survived was the one from the cement town, and the thirty-five people who signed for it are the reason.
Sources
- History of Northeast Indiana: LaGrange, Steuben, Noble and DeKalb Counties. Volume 1, the banks chapter, the summary table of county banks, the plat record and the physical features chapter, Ira Ford, 1920. Internet Archive. Printed pages 57 and 58 carry the Stroh bank, its officers, its capital and the thirty-five original stockholders, and the summary table giving four banks of this name in the county: Shipshewana 1907, South Milford 1910, Stroh 1915, Topeka 1918, with its header dating the chapter's present figures to the autumn of 1919
- History of Northeast Indiana. Volume 2, the biography of Roy Perkins, Ira Ford, 1920. Internet Archive. Gives the bank's organization date as November 16, 1915, the full board of directors, and Perkins's years as a teacher before he became cashier
- Our History, Farmers State Bank. The company's own account of itself. Carries the June 1915 organizing meeting, the forty stockholders, the opening figures, the Bank Holiday, the LaGrange office of November 7, 1934, and the asset milestones
- Institution record for certificate 14578, Farmers State Bank, LaGrange, Indiana, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Public record. Twelve offices and their insurance dates, total assets and deposits, state charter, and nineteen change events since 1934
Ford's text and the stockholder list were read from the page images of the Internet Archive scan rather than from its optical transcription, which carried at least one wrong name. Obvious scanning errors elsewhere have been corrected silently and no wording has been altered. The bank's own history is the company's account of itself: two claims in it, that no depositor lost a cent and that it is the only locally owned bank in the community, are attributed here rather than stated, and the second is not used. The dates in the federal deposit record are the dates each office entered the deposit insurance system, which began in 1934, and not the dates offices opened. Read as founding dates they invert the bank's actual history.
Since publication
Correction ·
This piece said the plant employed hundreds of men and that the capitalists came from Milwaukee, both attributed to the 1920 county history. That book's physical features chapter does say hundreds and Milwaukee. Its Milford Township chapter, which is the detailed account and gives the kilns and their capacities, says seventy-five men and names Emil Stroh of Detroit and other stockholders of the Wabash Railroad Company. The piece now carries both readings and states which chapter each comes from. The bank, its date, its stockholders and the plat record are unaffected.
Correction ·
This piece said the town was platted as Hayward after William Hayward, who owned the ground. The 1920 county history says it was first called Hayward and that William Hayward was its proprietor, and does not say who chose the name. On the ground, the 1920 history says the land where the village stands was his father Isaac's and that Isaac sold the farm to William, and the 1882 history has William buying the family homestead. The two give different years for the family's arrival in the township, 1844 in 1920 and 1848 in 1882, and neither settles it. The sentence now says what both support.
Correction ·
This piece said Emil Stroh put his money into the bank alongside the people who worked in the plant. The 1920 county history lists the thirty-five original stockholders by name only and gives none of them an occupation, so nothing here says any of them worked at the plant. The sentence now says that the list names thirty-four others and not what they did.
Correction ·
This piece said the private bank of Hewlitt Davis's father at Shipshewana closed in 1909, eighty-two years before the 1991 office opened. Nothing supports 1909. The 1920 county history says the Farmers State Bank was organized in October 1907 as the direct successor of the private bank, and gives no date for the private bank's closing. The clause and the figure built on it are gone.