Stroh
Exclusively in the rich soil
Published .
In 1899 a man platted a village in the far corner of Milford Township and named it after himself. Within a year it was burning cement out of the bottom of a marsh.
On the first of September, 1899, William Hayward laid out a village in the northeast corner of section 13, township 36, range 11, which is about as far into the southeast corner of this county as you can get.
He called it Hayward.
Five months later, on the fifteenth of February, 1900, it was renamed Stroh, after a capitalist from Detroit who did not live there.
There was no town on that spot, and the man who made one is already on the map.
The county atlas of 1893 has no Stroh in it, in the chronology or anywhere else, because six years before the plat there was no town to name. What it does have is a line in the Milford patron list: Hayward, Wm., section 13, post office Turkey Creek. The section is the one he platted. The post office is the country one that served that corner before rural delivery, and it is gone now too.
By 1910 there were three hundred and fifty people. By 1920 there was a bank, a four-storey brick school, a Masonic lodge, and a Christian and a Methodist Episcopal church, and the county history of that year calls the place a Twentieth Century Village.
It is equally plain about why it is there at all.
The village owes its existence solely to the cement industry, which sprang into existence in 1899 by the discovery of a valuable clay and a cement stone.
The works opened in 1900 with four small kilns making six hundred barrels of cement a day.
Two years later they put in six more and went to eleven hundred. In 1915 they tore out the whole original system and built three large kilns, and the output went to two thousand barrels a day.
The company was the Wabash Portland Cement Company, controlled by Emil Stroh of Detroit and other stockholders of the Wabash Railroad Company, which is where the name came from. Its head chemist was a local man: Dallas Wert, born on a farm in the same township in 1870, who went to St. Mary's and then to Purdue and came home to run the chemistry.
The railway was a spur off the Wabash running northwest out of Helmer, and the history of the next county over describes what was at the end of it as the famous cement works.
The town got its bank in 1915, fifteen years after the kilns.
What they were digging was the bottom of a lake.
Marl is what settles out of still water over a very long time. The 1893 atlas lays out the order of it: the great drift deposits of sand and gravel and clay and boulders that bury the rock a hundred feet down, and over those the mould of primeval forests and the peat and marl and humus of lakes and marshes.
Burnt with the right clay, it makes cement.
Seventeen years before any of this, the county's own historian had gone looking for something in this ground worth taking out, and had come back with almost nothing.
No stone quarries, he wrote, and the only building stone the boulders, which do for foundation walls and not much else. Little clay, and much of it so mixed with gravel as to be useless.
There was bog iron in the marshes. They had tried that. There was enough of it on Buck Creek to be smelted for some years at what they called the Old Forge in Lima Township, and enough in Hobbs' Marsh to be dug and hauled there, and the business soon proved unprofitable and was discontinued some time before the war. The book's judgement on the ore is that it is not valuable, unless as the last resort.
Then one clause, easy to miss, in the middle of the same paragraph.
In many of the marshes, large beds of marl are found.
And then the verdict.
The resources of La Grange County, it will be seen, are exclusively in the rich soil.
The 1920 book copies that sentence out and lets it stand, and then adds a paragraph after it in which men arrive from elsewhere and develop things.
How many they employed depends on which chapter you read.
Its chapter on the county's physical features says Milwaukee capitalists developed the great marl beds and put in a great cement plant which employs hundreds of men.
Its chapter on Milford Township, which is the one that counts the kilns and dates the rebuilds, ends its account like this.
Seventy five men find employment at these cement works.
Same book, same author, same plant. The chapter with the capacities in it gives the smaller number, and the chapter with the larger number also puts the money in the wrong city.
Here is the thing no source in this archive says, and this piece will not say it either. Marl is a lake deposit. This county spent fifty years draining its lakes and marshes, and then dug cement out of what lay under them. Both are in the 1920 history, four chapters apart. The sentence recording that the drainage had greatly reduced the size of many of the county's lakes and the sentence calling the cement works famous were written by the same man for the same book, and he never puts them together.
Sources
- Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana: Historical and Biographical. Chapter I and the township chapters, F.A. Battey and Co., 1882. Internet Archive. Chapter I, printed pages 13 and 14, for the minerals paragraph entire: the absence of stone quarries, the boulders as the only building stone, the clay too mixed with gravel to use, the bog iron as limonite with the smelting at the Old Forge in Lima Township on Buck Creek, the judgement that the ore is not valuable unless as a last resort, the marl clause as quoted, and the verdict as quoted. A township chapter for the bog iron in Hobbs' Marsh, mined and hauled to the Lima forge, unprofitable and discontinued some time before the war.
- Illustrated Atlas and Columbian Souvenir of LaGrange County, Indiana, Durant, 1893. Internet Archive. The agriculture and resources section for the drift deposits and for the peat and marl and humus of lakes and marshes, and the Milford patron list for William Hayward on section 13 with the Turkey Creek post office. BOTH ATLAS READINGS ARE FROM THE TRANSCRIPTION RATHER THAN THE PAGE IMAGE; the frontmatter records what was tried and why the leaf was not found.
- History of Northeast Indiana: LaGrange, Steuben, Noble and DeKalb Counties. Volumes 1 and 2, Ira Ford, 1920. Internet Archive. Volume 1, the Milford Township chapter, for the plat of 1 September 1899 by William Hayward as Hayward and the renaming of 15 February 1900, the population of 350 in 1910, the village owing its existence solely to the cement industry as quoted, the works established in 1900 under Emil Stroh of Detroit and other stockholders of the Wabash Railroad Company, the four kilns at six hundred barrels, the six more of 1902 at eleven hundred, the three large kilns of 1915 at two thousand, the seventy-five men as quoted, and the bank, school, lodge and churches. The physical features chapter for the Milwaukee capitalists and the hundreds of men. The Steuben half for Helmer as the junction of the spur. Volume 2 for the Wabash Portland Cement Company by name and for Dallas Wert, born in Milford Township on 9 June 1870, as its head chemist.
All three volumes are scanned text. Obvious scanning errors are corrected and no wording is altered; Ford sets "quantit'es" and "sh'pped" in the Stroh paragraph and "sour" for spur, and those are set here as the words they are. THE TWO FIGURES FOR THE WORKFORCE ARE BOTH FORD'S AND THIS PIECE RESOLVES NEITHER. His chapter on the county's physical features says the plant employs hundreds of men and puts the money in Milwaukee; his Milford Township chapter, which counts the kilns and dates every rebuild, says seventy-five men and names Emil Stroh of Detroit. One man, one book, two chapters. THE CLOSING PARAGRAPH IS AN OBSERVATION OF OURS AND NOT A FINDING OF ANYBODY'S. No source in this archive names a lake or a marsh that was dug for marl, and none connects the drainage to the cement. What the sources do say is that marl is a lake and marsh deposit, that the beds were developed, and that the drainage had greatly reduced the size of many of the lakes, and those three sentences sit in two books without ever meeting.