Legally called

On the first of June, 1891, the engineer George S. Morison sent a report from Chicago to a committee of the Wabash directors. He had been asked to study a railroad that did not yet exist.

the proposed extension of the Wabash Railroad from a point near Montpelier, Ohio, on the Detroit Division, to a connection with the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad at the Illinois and Indiana State line, legally called the Montpelier and Chicago Railroad

That line crossed the south of this county. Its company had filed articles of association with the State of Indiana on the twenty-eighth of February, 1890, under the name Montpelier & Chicago Railroad Company. The register records the name and the date and no route, so the filing cannot be tied to Morison's line on the register alone.

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The county never called it that.

The atlas of 1893 calls it the Wabash railroad, and the Wabash railroad extension. The 1920 county history calls it the Wabash. The railway mail map of 1897 draws it across the county's southern edge as a dashed line, with every station lettered, and puts no name on the line at all. The company's own name appears in none of them.

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The county's part in building it is recorded in the atlas's chronology, and nowhere else in this archive.

In July of 1890 Milford Township voted aid to the railroad. The atlas gives the vote a sentence, and the sentence is not about the railroad.

Milford township votes aid to the Wabash railroad, this being the second local trial in Indiana, of the Australian election system.

The atlas says Milford's was the second. It does not say where the first was, or what the vote was, or by how much it carried, and the county's other books do not mention it at all.

The system itself was fourteen months old. Governor Alvin P. Hovey had proclaimed the tenth of May, 1889, as the day the acts of the Fifty-sixth General Assembly took effect, and the general election law passed at that session is the one the state was buying red-tinted tickets and rubber stamps for. So a township in the south of this county was using a new way of voting, on a railroad, in its second outing anywhere in Indiana.

In October of 1891 the atlas records grading on the Wabash railroad extension. By the time the atlas went to press, trains were already running through the southern part of the county.

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The trade press dated the rest.

On the eighth of July, 1892, the Railroad Gazette ran its notice under the company's name.

Tracklaying began at Montpelier, O., July 1, and will be continued west at the rate, it is expected, of two miles a day.

Poor's Manual for 1893 said the line would be opened for traffic about May 1, 1893. Later editions give the dates exactly: open for freight on the thirtieth of April, 1893, and for passenger trains on the fourteenth of May.

It cost more than planned. Poor's charges $374,665.86 against the Wabash's accounts as the cost of the Montpelier and Chicago in excess of what its first mortgage bonds had raised. The company's annual report, printed in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle in September of 1894, gave the reason.

This expenditure in excess of the careful estimates of the cost of construction of this line was largely due to unexpected difficulties met by the contractors in "sink holes" and the extra expense of bridges and abutments to avoid crossing other railways at grade.

The report does not say where along the line the sink holes were.

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Once it was running, the Wabash ran it, and on paper it stayed a separate company.

The State Board of Tax Commissioners assessed it under its own name. The 1894 journal heads the entry MONTPELIER & CHICAGO, 139.26 miles, and values its buildings township by township. In this county that was a station at South Milford at $600, a station at Eddy at $400, and a station at Topeka at $450 with two hand-car houses. The Wolcottville station stood just over the line in Noble County. By 1905 the board had added a station at Stroh, at $300, where the cement works would stand.

The line had its own mortgage, the Detroit and Chicago Extension, Montpelier to Clarke Junction, 149.7 miles. The Wabash's report for the year ending June 30, 1899, carries a separate statement headed Results of Operation of the Montpelier & Chicago R. R.: gross earnings of $1,061,094.85, and a surplus after interest of $30,939.90.

At Topeka there was a town now, platted because the line came.

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The name did not go away.

In 1916 the state's tax proceedings listed the buildings in this county under WABASH, and under that, in brackets, Montpelier & Chicago. South Milford, Eddy, Topeka and Stroh.

And the Wabash's own annual report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1915, twenty-two years after the first passenger train, lists what it spent that year on extending and changing passing tracks on Montpelier and Chicago Line. South Milford, $126.22. Wolcottville, $3,904.63. Eddy, $2,599.63. Topeka, $2,345.15.