Stroh
Exclusively in the rich soil
Published . Last updated .
In 1899 William Hayward platted a village in the far corner of Milford Township, and it was first called Hayward. 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.
It was first called Hayward.
The name was in the papers before the plat was. The Auburn Courier, in its issue of the twenty-seventh of July, 1899, passed on a report from the Kendallville Sun that a new town had been laid out at the cement works near Helmer and named Haywood City in honor of Wm. Haywood, its promoter. The paper spells him Haywood. It does not say who chose the name.
Five months later, on the fifteenth of February, 1900, it was renamed Stroh, after a capitalist from Detroit.
The Courier gave the reason in an item that carries no date, this time passing on the LaGrange Standard. The state already had a post office with a name too close to Hayward, and mail for the two would have been confused, so the application for a post office in the new town has been amended by changing the name to Stroh, after the man who had run the new industry there from the start.
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 Steuben County chapters of the same 1920 history describe 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 names Emil Stroh of Detroit. The chapter with the larger number says the money came from Milwaukee.
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
- The Auburn Courier, weekly, Auburn, DeKalb County, Indiana, 1899. Internet Archive, the bound run from 6 July 1899 to 27 December 1900. Scan leaf 35, the back page of the issue of 27 July 1899, reprinting the Kendallville Sun on Haywood City; the page itself is undated and the date is read off the same issue's leaves 31 and 33. Scan leaf 159, an undated inside page, reprinting the LaGrange Standard on the change of name to Stroh. Both read off the page images on 26 September 2026.
- 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 page 16 of the LaGrange County half, scan leaf 18, 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.
Since publication
Correction ·
This piece said the man who platted the village named it after himself, and that he called it Hayward. The 1920 county history says the town was first called Hayward and that William Hayward was its proprietor. It does not say who chose the name, and neither does any other source here. The opening, the summary and the second section now say what the book says.
Correction ·
This piece said the town was renamed after a capitalist from Detroit who did not live there. The 1920 county history calls Emil Stroh a capitalist of Detroit and says nothing about where he lived, and no source here does. The words "who did not live there" are removed.
This piece said the chapter of the 1920 county history that gives the larger workforce also puts the money in the wrong city. That was a verdict between two chapters of the same book, which name Milwaukee and Detroit, and no independent record has been read that settles it. The piece now says which chapter names which city, and leaves it there.
Update ·
The Post Office Department's register of postmaster appointments gives a second date beside the one this piece takes from Ford. Its first entry for the Stroh office is the appointment of William Hayward as postmaster on 26 January 1900, three weeks before 15 February 1900, the date Ford gives for the village's legal name. The register files appointments under the name an office later carried, so the row heading Stroh is not proof that Stroh was the name in use on 26 January 1900. The two records date two different things, and both dates stand.
Evidence: The register's row for the Stroh office, read off the page image, whose first appointment is William Hayward, 26 January 1900. No row for an office named Hayward appears on register pages 252 to 255 or 267 to 268, the pages read. Source: National Archives, Record Group 28, Records of Appointment of Postmasters and the Establishment of Post Offices, microfilm M841, file unit 78738094, register page 254.
Correction ·
Our source entry cited printed pages 13 and 14 of the LaGrange County half of the 1882 county history for the minerals paragraph. The paragraph is on printed page 16, scan leaf 18. Pages 13 and 14 carry the lakes and the marshes. The paragraph we quoted is the one we meant and its wording is unchanged, but the citation pointed at the wrong pages, and a reader following it would not have found what we said was there.