A controlling interest

The power was at Ontario and the people were at Lima, and that was the whole problem.

A dam went up on the Pigeon River at Ontario about 1834, built by J. C. Kinney and a Mr. Hubbard, who had come from Ohio and settled on the north bank. A sawmill followed on the south bank, and then a small set of grinding buhrs. Lima was the county seat and had about three times the people, and no water power worth the name.

In 1836 Nathan Jenks bought the mill property at Ontario. And when he bought it, he said what he meant to do with it.

at which time he stated that it was his intention to secure an act of the Legislature to charter a company who should bear the expense of conducting the water-power created by the dam at Ontario, from the latter place, through a long race, to Lima.

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It got further than most schemes of that kind ever do.

The act passed. The route was staked off on the ground. Subscription books were opened, and the citizens of Lima signed them liberally, which is the county history's word.

Then this.

but for some reason unknown to the writer, and to most of all the old settlers, Mr. Jenks subscribed a controlling interest in the stock, and abandoned the project without further ado, greatly to the regret of Lima.

He bought enough of it to control it, and then he stopped it.

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That is the mechanism, and it is worth sitting with.

He did not withdraw. He did not fail to raise the money. He was not outvoted or bought out. He put his own money into a company he had proposed, chartered and staked, until he owned enough of it to decide by himself that it would not happen.

And the people whose town it was going to serve had already signed the books.

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The county historian could not establish why, and says so twice.

It is thought by the writer that, as Mr. Jenks was dissatisfied about this time with the offers made him by Lima to induce him to locate the "La Grange Collegiate Institute" there instead of at Ontario, and as he refused to accept their proffered assistance as being not an adequate consideration, this had something to do with his action in canceling what had been done toward continuing the water-power to Lima.

And then, flatly:

The real facts could not be ascertained why Mr. Jenks so completely "squelched" the work on the race.

The quotation marks around squelched are his.

Lima had made him a serious offer for the college, and the trustees turned it down in writing. He called it not an adequate consideration. The county's first college opened at Ontario on the twenty-first of October, 1839.

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There was a larger plan behind it, and this archive has already written about it.

The same chapter says Jenks meant to build up Ontario at the expense of Lima and take the county seat away from it, and that locating the Institute at Ontario and setting aside the race were both part of doing that. The 1920 history puts it more bluntly: Jenks had it in for Lima.

The seat went to LaGrange in 1844. Neither county history ever says he lost.

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What he built instead was real, and for a while it was the best thing in the county.

He built the race at Ontario after all, on his own side of the river, and about 1843 he put up a grist mill that cost ten thousand dollars. Four storeys, four sets of French buhrs. It ran day and night with two sets of hands, and in one year thirty thousand barrels of flour went out of it by wagon.

Ontario went from about twelve families in 1838 to twenty-five in 1840, a population of about a hundred and twenty. The county history says it never exceeded three hundred. Its best years were between 1850 and 1864.

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Then the record loses him.

He sold his interest in the store in 1840. The grist mill passed to other hands about 1860. The Institute was wound up by a receiver in 1881, and the mill he built burned down about a year before the county history went to press.

And that is the last of him.

The 1882 volume carries four hundred and five biographies of men in this county, and Nathan Jenks is not among them. No wife is named, no children, no birth year, no death, no estate, no will. The man who platted Ontario, founded the county's first college and stopped a canal by buying it does not have a paragraph of his own in the book that tells all three stories.

The first tract of land ever sold in Clay Township was certificate number 4,536, issued to Nathan Jenks on the ninth of June, 1835. Both county histories record it. Neither of them notices that it is a year before either of them has him arriving.