LaGrange County
Copyright 1904
Published .
The map names its makers in the second line and claims copyright in the third.
THE 1904 MAP OF LA GRANGE COUNTY
BY SHEPARDSON & RERICK, LA GRANGE, IND.
COPYRIGHT 1904.
Not surveyed by, not published by. The lithography is credited separately at the foot of the sheet, to W. Wangersheim of Chicago. The two men are the authors of it, and they took out a copyright on a map of their own county.
What they made is one sheet with the whole county on it.
All eleven townships, every section, and inside the sections the fields, each one inscribed with an owner's name and the number of acres. The town of LaGrange drawn as a street grid with its lots. Schools marked and lettered where they stood. The county infirmary named. The lakes named one by one.
The 1893 atlas has the owners too, on eleven separate township leaves. Its single county sheet has no names on it at all: the grid, the section numbers, the railroads and the creeks, and LaGrange as a plain hatched block. This puts the whole county's ownership on one piece of paper.
Samuel Shepardson spent his working life inside the county's records.
He was born in Springfield Township on the nineteenth of March, 1839, to Otis and Susann Shepardson, who had come out from Vermont about 1835. He enlisted in Company G of the Thirtieth Indiana on the twenty-fourth of September, 1861.
He was county treasurer from 1869 to 1873 and county auditor from 1874. When the county built its courthouse, the outline plan handed to the architects was drawn by Shepardson and the clerk, and his name is cut into the cornerstone as auditor.
Twenty years of tax duplicates, transfers and plat books, and then a map of who owned what.
John Rerick had written the county down already.
He was the editor and proprietor of the LaGrange Standard, a physician, and he signed four chapters of the 1882 county history. He has his own piece here, and the thing that piece is about is what he did when his regiment's history reached a battle he had not seen.
Here is what there is on the two of them together.
Nothing.
Search both county volumes for the firm in every form it could take and it returns nothing. Search for the two surnames within four hundred characters of each other, anywhere in nine hundred pages, and it returns nothing. They appear in the same file four times and every one is a list: the roll of county officers, the war roll, the cornerstone, and the biographies, where each has his own separate sketch and neither sketch mentions the other man.
Shepardson is named thirty times in those books. Rerick is named forty-six times. Together, once, on a map neither book mentions.
There is one thing on the sheet that will not resolve.
Running west out of LaGrange, and again east and west through Shipshewana beside the Lake Shore railroad, a line is lettered ELECTRIC.
Ford's seventh chapter is headed First and Present Steam and Electric Roads. The word Electric does not appear in that chapter again.
Sixteen years after the map, he writes that the Grand Rapids and Indiana is the only railroad in the county, save a short spur to the northeast. And in his chapter on the town he mentions, in passing, that the old frame car barns burned some years before, the only really destructive fire since the waterworks went in.
A county with no electric road, and the barns its cars would have stood in. Either it was built and failed, or it was drawn as though built and never was, which this county has seen before. Nothing in hand decides it, and no LaGrange County newspaper is digitised anywhere, so the Standard cannot be asked.
Neither county history mentions any map or atlas of this county. The word does not appear in either volume: not this map, not the 1893 atlas, not the 1874 one. Battey was printed twenty-two years too early to record this sheet. Ford was writing sixteen years after it, in a book that lists the county's banks, its newspapers, its secret societies and its folding chair industry.
The auditor and the editor put their names on a map of the county and their copyright under it, and the county's own histories do not know it happened.
Sources
- The 1904 map of La Grange County, Shepardson and Rerick, 1904. Map Collection, Indiana Division, Indiana State Library, via Indiana Memory. Lithographed by W. Wangersheim, Chicago. Public domain, No Copyright - United States.
- Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana, chapter II and the LaGrange biographies, F. A. Battey and Company, 1882. Internet Archive. Shepardson and Rerick's separate sketches, the officer rolls, and the courthouse cornerstone.
- History of Northeast Indiana, volume 1, chapters VII and XIX, Ira Ford, 1920. The railroads chapter and the town of LaGrange chapter.
The map is a public domain state library scan and is linked above, so a reader can open the sheet and read the title block for themselves. The claim that the partnership leaves no other trace is a measurement rather than an impression: both volumes were searched for the firm name in every form and for the two surnames within four hundred characters of each other, against controls that return thirty mentions of Shepardson and forty-six of Rerick. The electric line is reported and not resolved, because nothing in hand resolves it.
More from LaGrange County
LaGrange County
The perverse running of the railway too far to the north
When this county sent its men to the Civil War they walked to Fort Wayne, because there was no railroad. The first locomotive arrived in 1870 to a cannon and a band. Then four townships spent thirty years waiting for one that never came.