Not, however, ungrateful

The centre of the county turned out to be a swamp.

The act re-locating the county seat fixed it at the center of the county, which really brought it to a spot found hilly, swampy and on Fly Creek. The land was heavily covered with timber, and underbrush and brambles which took years of time and great labor to exterminate.

That is Ford, in 1920. The 1882 history had already described the same ground, and added a luxurious growth of blackberry brambles to it.

They put a contract out to Shadrack Carney to cut down all the stately trees on the public square. It left the square without a shade tree until somebody planted new ones years later. South and east of it was swamp, and filling that took years of work and many hundreds of loads of earth.

The game was still there while they were doing it. Ans Clark killed seven deer in one day within gunshot of the square as it was being cleared.

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They had come there on a principle.

The act that organised the county in 1832 said its business was to be conducted as near the center of the county as a convenient place could be had, and for twelve years it was not. The seat sat at Lima in the top tier, bought with eighty-four town lots and lost again when the southern townships filled up. Battey counts two hundred and eighty-six lots in that plat and Ford counts two hundred and eighty-four.

The town was platted on the new ground in 1836, a courthouse went up on it in 1843, and the seat arrived in 1844. The building that replaced that one carries both dates cut into its cornerstone.

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Five men had been appointed to decide where it would go, and the record of what they did is empty.

The legislature named Levi G. Thompson and Francis Comparet of Allen County, W. B. Griffith of St. Joseph, Peter Noland of Delaware and William Watt of Union. It ordered them to fix the seat of justice on the second Monday of May, 1833, at the house of Moses Rice, and it made the sheriff of Allen County responsible for telling them so.

Comparet is the Fort Wayne merchant who had men selling whisky at a log tavern in Johnson Township while he was doing it.

Neither county history records that these five men met. Neither records what they decided, or when, or where. Lima simply appears as the seat.

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There was a third town in the fight, and both accounts of the removal leave it out.

Nathan Jenks had founded the Collegiate Institute at Ontario, and the county history says in a different chapter what he was doing with it.

Mr. Jenks thought that, by building up Ontario at the expense of Lima, he could, in the end, succeed in securing the removal of the county seat from the latter village to the former; and that, therefore, he located the Institute at Ontario, set aside the work on the race, and did all he could to kill Lima and infuse vitality into Ontario.

Ford is blunter. Jenks had it in for Lima and wanted to get the railroad, the school and also get the county seat.

Battey's own comment on the motive is that the real facts could not be ascertained.

So the harmonious agreement of the county-seat chapters is a two-town story told about a three-town fight, and the third town is in a chapter forty pages away.

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Now the two men who owned the ground it landed on.

Two land-owners, Joshua T. Hobbs and Reuben J. Dawson, were materially benefited by this creation of a new town. They were not, however, ungrateful for the favor, but manifested their appreciation of the new state of things by the donation of grounds for a public square.

Joshua Hobbs was this county's first clerk, elected in the spring of 1832, and a physician, a Maryland man and a Bowdoin graduate. Ford says most of the duties of the clerk's office were attended to by his wife. In 1844, the year the seat moved onto the town he had an interest in, he was elected associate judge. His health failed in 1850 and he left for Ohio and died there, leaving what Ford calls a handsome estate. There is a marsh in Clay Township with his name on it.

Reuben Dawson did not live in this county at all. He was in DeKalb, represented DeKalb and Steuben in the State Senate in 1850, became judge of the Tenth Judicial Circuit, and was a presidential elector in 1856.

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Thirty-eight years later Ford wrote the same two facts and cut the sentence between them.

There the Town of La Grange was laid out on lands owned by Joshua T. Hobbs and Reuben J. Dawson. These men were materially benefited by the creation of a new town. They liberally gave a public square to the county.

Not, however, ungrateful for the favor is gone. So is the word favour, and so is the idea that anything was owed.

Battey's clause only exists because ingratitude was conceivable. Nobody denies a charge that has not occurred to them. He states the benefit, admits it needs answering, and answers it. Ford states the benefit, states the gift, and puts nothing between them at all, which leaves a reader to make of it whatever they like.

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And the ownership Ford states so plainly is not what either book says elsewhere.

The 1882 history and Ford's own chapter on the town both say the land was entered from the government at Fort Wayne in 1835 by George Whittaker and Theodore Craft, and that Hobbs bought an interest afterwards. The plat of June 1836 was made by four men, Dawson, Beavers, Whittaker and McConnell, and Hobbs is not among them.

Ford's sixteenth chapter gives a third version, in which the land was purchased from the United States by Dawson, Beavers, Whittaker and McConnell, with Craft gone and Dawson promoted from platter to purchaser.

Three accounts of who owned the ground the county seat was moved onto, and the sentence about the two men agrees with none of them.

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Lima got one line for the whole thing, and it is the only exclamation mark in any of this material.

From 1832 to 1838 Lima grew very rapidly, and when it lost the county seat, it got its everlasting set-back!

Afterwards, Ford says, old Lima had to depend largely upon the farming community for its support.

Battey, who supplied two land-owners with a defence they had not been charged with needing, says only that the town continued to grow and thrive until the county seat was removed. His own chapter on Lima does not support it.