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LaGrange

The courthouse they paid cash for

It cost seventy-five thousand dollars, took fifteen months, bankrupted its contractors halfway through, and when it was finished the county did not owe a dollar on it.

The LaGrange County Courthouse seen from the front walk, a red brick building with cream stone trim and a clock tower topped by a yellow dome, framed by two dark leaved maples, with a concrete walk running up to the arched entrance and marigolds along the edge of the lawn.

Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, 2016. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  • Newbury Township

    To people without

    Amish families bought farms in Newbury Township in 1844, and by 1881 they held most of it. Both of this county's histories wrote about them, thirty-eight years apart, and the difference is who held the pen.

  • An engraved map headed MOVEMENTS OF THE 44TH INDIANA, printed in black line on toned cream paper, covering Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and the edges of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, with a legend of four route types and a corner inset of northeastern Indiana lettering LA GRANGE with the towns Lima and Lagrange marked.

    LaGrange County

    A county that had never seen a soldier

    In April of 1861 the courthouse filled to capacity, a man of seventy presided who had fought in 1812, and a doctor pulled from his pocket an enlistment paper he had already written. This county sent about fourteen hundred men to the war. Ninety-one said they would not go.

  • A detail from an 1892 fire insurance map showing the block east of the courthouse square. At the top left a small building lettered Print'g is shaded green for a special hazard, with Up. B. Bs't beneath it for an upper boiler in the basement. Below and right of it, an unshaded white rectangle interrupting the brick is lettered Burned Out. The storefront row beneath runs from 155 to 149 with each trade lettered, Offices Above across the middle, and a note in the street reading that a building is being repaired and when completed will be occupied as before.

    LaGrange

    What the county seat gained and lost

    Between 1901 and 1910 LaGrange got a telephone exchange, a fire station, a post office, a pickle factory and an ice cream factory. In the same nine years it lost two churches, a hotel and every printing office in town.

  • A detail from a 1914 fire insurance map. Two small brick buildings stand together on Race Street, one lettered Fire Dept and the other Water Works, with handwritten notes beside them listing a hand hose reel, seven hundred fifty feet of hose, a hook and ladder truck, a National fire pump, two six inch wells and a twenty-five horsepower gasoline engine. Pressure tanks of seven thousand gallons each are drawn inside. A buried gasoline tank is marked in the yard, a hydrant at the street corner, and four inch and six inch water pipe runs along the road.

    Wolcottville

    In a useless condition

    Nobody in Wolcottville wrote down how the town got water. The insurance company did, by accident, across twenty-seven years of coming back to price the risk of it burning down.

  • South Milford

    Known far down in the southern states

    Benjamin Waterhouse moved about a hundred people through Milford Township on their way to Canada. In 1854 the federal government tried him for it, and one of the witnesses against him was the brother of a former president of the United States.

  • Mongo

    One hundred twenty people at the same table

    In 1844, a hundred and twenty people from Indiana and Michigan moved into a single building in Springfield Township and started dividing the work by committee. The men who organized it were the same men who had organized the township.

  • Scott

    Resolved into wheat fields

    Van Buren Township has had three villages. One was dissolved by petition, one died when the railroad went somewhere else, and the third exists because of the railroad that killed the second.

  • Topeka

    The Haw Patch had everything but a town

    It had the best soil in the county, the earliest settlers, two feuding founding families, a lynching, and a lecture hall that seated three hundred fifty. What it did not have, for sixty years, was a town.

  • Shipshewana

    The town came last

    Shipshewana was platted in January of 1889. Almost everything that makes it Shipshewana was already forty-five years old.

  • Wolcottville

    They wrote to Vermont for a teacher

    In 1851 Wolcottville had about a hundred people, a grist mill, a distillery, and no school worth the name. So the man who owned most of it wrote to a former governor of Vermont and asked him to send someone.

  • Brighton

    Two things that were not there

    In the summer of 1832 a hundred armed men gathered in Greenfield Township to put down a massacre that had not happened. Four years later, men in the East bought corner lots in a village that did not exist.

  • The LaGrange County Courthouse seen from the front walk, a red brick building with cream stone trim and a clock tower topped by a yellow dome, framed by two dark leaved maples, with a concrete walk running up to the arched entrance and marigolds along the edge of the lawn.

    Howe

    The town that has had three names

    Howe was called Lima for seventy-five years. Before that it was called Mongoquinong. It held the county seat, lost it, emptied out for sixty years, and then took the name of a lawyer who arrived before any of that happened.

The county

LaGrange County, Indiana. The eleven civil townships, every one of them now represented in the archive.
The eleven civil townships. The archive holds a piece set in every one.

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