Fourteen streets and not one of their own

On the eighteenth of June, 1836, four men laid out the town that would become this county's seat, and gave its streets fourteen names.

the names of the streets being Mountain, High, Detroit, Poplar, Walnut, Sycamore and Canal, running north and south; Lake, Steuben, Factory, Michigan, Spring, Lafayette and Wayne, running east and west

The four were Reuben J. Dawson, William F. Beavers, George F. Whittaker and James McConnell. Not one of the fourteen names is theirs.

---

They had every opportunity and no apparent interest.

The town was theirs to name. They laid it off into lots sixty-six feet by a hundred and thirty-two, with streets sixty-six feet wide and alleys sixteen and a half, crossing each other at right angles. The ground underneath had been entered from the government at Fort Wayne the year before, and the books disagree three ways about who owned it. The square they gave the county is in the middle of it. The seat itself would not arrive for another eight years.

What they reached for instead was cities, trees, hills and water. Detroit and Michigan and Wayne and Lake and Canal are places to go or things to go on. Poplar, Walnut and Sycamore are what was standing there. Mountain, High and Spring are the lie of the land. Factory is what they hoped for.

Two of the fourteen honour a person, and both are borrowed. Lafayette is the county's own namesake, the French marquis whose estate gave LaGrange its name. Steuben, in the 1920 history's words, is named for Baron Frederick de Steuben, a soldier of no little historic note, who served under King Frederick, of Prussia.

A Frenchman and a Prussian. Neither one of the four men holding the pen.

---

The detail that sharpens it is what William Beavers did for a living.

Battey places him in the southern part of the county and records that he was, for several years, County Surveyor. The man whose profession was measuring ground and setting names to it helped name fourteen streets and kept his own name off all of them.

The others were not obscure either. Whittaker was a merchant at Lima, and with Theodore Craft had entered the land itself. McConnell farmed in Eden Township and was an early County Commissioner, seated the same year as the plat. Dawson did not live in this county at all: he was in DeKalb, went to the State Senate for DeKalb and Steuben in 1850, became judge of the Tenth Judicial Circuit, and stood as a presidential elector in 1856.

Four men with offices, land and standing, and a blank where their names could have been.

---

Here is the limit of what this piece can prove, and it is worth stating before going further.

The absence is documented. Battey prints the fourteen names in a single sentence, as a list, from the survey itself, and four known surnames are not in it. A list is not a search: it cannot fail to mention something the way prose can.

What comes next is not documented in the same way. No source in this archive says that any street in this county was named for anybody. All four volumes were searched for the phrases these books use when they explain a name, and eleven such statements turned up. They explain a township, a town, a lake, a rector, a grandfather and one canal engineer described as good-looking. Not one of them explains a street.

So the connections below are drawn from adjacency: a man laid out an addition on a dated day, and a street inside it carries his surname. That is a strong pattern and it is not a sentence anybody wrote down.

---

The names arrived later, and they arrived through land.

Battey lists the additions made to the town after the original plat, with their dates. Ellison's on the south, the sixth of May, 1861. Drake's in the west, laid out by James L. Drake on the sixth of October, 1868. Ryason's, in the west half of the north east quarter of Section 30, the twenty-fourth of November, 1868. McClaskey's on the Haw Patch road, the thirteenth of February, 1869, and McClaskey's East Addition on the east side of the creek, by Robert McClaskey. Herbert's in the north west, fronting the Baubauga road, laid out by Ralph P. Herbert in 1877.

Sixteen years of it, and every one of those surnames is on the town map today in a way the platters' four are not.

John Ryason had been there from the beginning. He came in 1836, the same year as the plat, having bought lands near the present site of La Grange, and the county history says that after much hard work in improving the township he moved into the town and afterward died. His daughter, born in March of 1837, is claimed as the first birth in the township. His addition came thirty-two years after his arrival.

Robert McClaskey came later and built up. He reached LaGrange in October of 1844, through the Black Swamp near Van Wert, and the first court in the new seat was sitting in the frame courthouse when he arrived. He kept a shoe shop and made most of the boots and shoes for the town, added to his farm until he had two hundred acres adjoining it on the east, and then, in Ford's phrase, bought and laid out several subdivisions.

---

By 1893 the county atlas draws the result, and it draws it plainly.

In the north east corner of the town, the mapmaker letters Samuel K. Ruick down the right margin, across the open ground he owned. A few hundred feet west, running through the blocks beside his name, he letters Ruick Ave. Above and to the left, across another stretch of open ground, he letters Robert McClaskey, and below it, along a row of sixty-six foot lots, McClaskey's Eastern Addition.

The map does not say the street was named for the man. It puts them next to each other and leaves it there.

Samuel Ruick was president of the county fair in 1878 and 1879, executor of Dr. Hobbs's estate, first treasurer of St. John's when the Episcopalians organised in 1872, and a partner in the firm that bid on the courthouse. His opera house was finished in 1885 and the hotel that carried his name opened in January of 1890.

None of that is why the street is called Ruick Avenue, as far as any book here will say. It is only what the man was, on the ground the street runs through.

The four who named the streets had the one chance nobody else gets, and used it on a French marquis, a Prussian baron, three species of tree and the road to Detroit. The men who got their names onto this town bought the land first and drew the lots themselves, one addition at a time, thirty years after the fact.