Navigable by the largest vessels

In May 1836 William C. Tillman had a surveyor lay out a village on the north half of Section 1 in Bloomfield Township, on the Pigeon River, and named it Burlington.

The county history published in 1882 gives the plat as twenty-four blocks of twenty-four lots each and nine blocks of twelve. That comes to 684 lots. The book does not add them up.

It says Tillman then had a large plat of the village drawn and coloured. It says so with a hedge, it is said, and then describes what the plat showed.

...showing that it was located on the bank of the Pigeon River, which was represented on the plat as being of sufficient size to be navigable by the largest vessels.

He took it east. There he sold lots, corner lots, to families who agreed to move west and live on them.

When these families reached what their imaginations and the promises of Mr. Tillman had pictured as a fine growing village, they found the site to be in a swampy place, and half of the lots covered with water. The disappointment and dismay were complete.

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How many families went is given three times. The 1882 history says some six or eight families. Ira Ford's history of 1920 says some six or eight families, in a paragraph that follows the 1882 one point by point, so that is the same count printed twice. Herman Haskins, writing the Bloomfield Township section of the county's centennial history in 1928, says at least a half dozen families. His is the looser figure and it does not contradict the other.

What the families did when they got there is where the books part.

Not an effort, with one exception, was made to colonize the place, but all left for some other locality. One man made arrangements to build a house, obtained some lumber, and perhaps got the frame up, but soon abandoned the attempt, and the prospective Burlington was left to the sole habitation of the snakes, birds and batrachians.

That is the 1882 history. Ford, in 1920, leaves out the one man.

Not even a cabin was ever erected on that platting.

Haskins says nothing of a house. He has the corner lots, which Ford left out. He says the lots were marsh or water, and that their money was gone and they had nothing to show for it. Then he adds a moral the 1882 account does not draw.

Thus we learn that the swindler is not of recent origin.

Burlington was not the only village in the county platted in 1836 that came to nothing. Vistula, on Wall Lake, was another.

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The 1882 account of Burlington is set in square brackets, in the middle of the Bloomfield Township chapter. That chapter is signed by John Paul Jones. The bracket closes with two letters, Ed., which make it the editor's and not his.

It is not the only one. A search of the scanned text of the book's LaGrange County half finds three more passages closed the same way, and all four sit inside signed chapters. One introduces a paper on the county's geology and names the man who wrote it, Edward S. Edmunds. The other two, on the county's mounds and on two societies in the town of LaGrange, name no one. Burlington's names no one either.

The book does not say who the editor was, or where any of the unnamed accounts came from. Neither later book says where Burlington's came from.

Haskins, in 1928, ended his paragraph this way.

Not many of our citizens realize that there ever was such a village plat.