Takes its name from the village

In 1915 the United States Geological Survey published a volume of nearly six hundred pages on the ice that made the Great Lakes, and somewhere in the middle of it a ridge of gravel running out of this county got a name.

The Lagrange moraine takes its name from the village of Lagrange, the county seat of Lagrange County, which stands at the junction of the Saginaw and the Huron-Erie lobes.

A village the 1910 census counted at 1,772 people, named after a French estate, gave its name to a landform that runs out of Indiana and across the Michigan line.

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The reason is underneath the town.

Two lobes of the same ice sheet came at this ground from different directions. The Saginaw came from the east of north, the Huron-Erie from the south of east, and their lines of movement were roughly at right angles to each other. The Saginaw was the weaker of the two and left first. Where they met, they left a seam.

The county seat sits on it.

From the village the moraine leads north-west, roughly parallel with the Pigeon River, through southern Clay, north-eastern Newbury and south-western Van Buren townships, into Elkhart County, where the St. Joseph valley cuts it for a few miles before it sets in again in Michigan. Its counterpart on the other lobe leads south-west from the same village towards Ligonier, passing just east of Topeka. The whole thing is about three miles wide.

In the north-west of the county it does something a reader can go and look at.

Several square miles in the northwest part of Lagrange County and the northeast part of Elkhart County have sharp knob and basin topography, in which knobs 40 to 60 feet high inclose tamarack swamps and small lakes without outlet.

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The best land in the county is on the same account, and this is the part that finishes a story this paper has already told.

The Haw Patch had everything but a town is about a stretch of ground in Clearspring and Eden so good that a farmer with a working farm in Ohio heard about it from surveyors in 1830 and detoured on his way home to look at it. That piece says the soil was rich, the land level, the timber sugar maple and black walnut. It never says why.

Leverett says why, in one sentence about wells.

West and southwest of Topeka wells with depths of 50 to 76 feet are entirely through gravel and sand after passing through the thin surface capping of till. This district is known as the "Haw patch" and is one of the most productive farming areas in Indiana.

It is a gravel plain, laid down by water pouring off the melting ice, and in the monograph's accounting the gravel plains here are dependencies of the Lagrange moraine. Robert Latta rode out of his way to look at the outwash of a glacier, and the county historian who wrote him up in 1882 had no way of knowing it.

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Nobody here has ever found the bottom of this.

Several wells in the county go down about two hundred feet without reaching rock, and only one has ever been recorded as striking it: a farm well in the south-west, outside the moraine, where the driller reported black slate at a hundred and fifty feet. A prospect boring for artesian water at the county jail in Lagrange went two hundred and five feet without entering rock or getting a flow, and reported a bed of soil at sixty-five feet on the way down, which may mark the line between one ice sheet and an older one.

And there is coal in the ground here that was never formed here. Dryer noticed fragments of it in the drift of the western part of the county, and Leverett explains it without difficulty: the Saginaw lobe crossed the Michigan coal basin on its way to LaGrange County and brought some with it.

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The man who noticed the coal had been over this ground twenty years before the monograph, and he thought it could not be written down.

Charles R. Dryer reported on Noble and LaGrange counties for the State of Indiana in 1894. Leverett, who rarely praises anybody, said Dryer's reports "present exceptionally clear descriptions of the several moraines of the northeastern counties." The state's own report of 1900 quotes his paragraph on this county whole.

The general surface slopes gently to the north, except the lake region of Johnson Township, which is drained southward into the Elkhart River, the crest of the divide being near Valentine. It lies entirely upon the Saginaw side of the Saginaw-Erie interlobate moraine of Chamberlain, and contains no Erie drift, except, possibly, at the southeast corner. It is crossed by two terminal moraines of the Saginaw glacier, so that about one-half of the county presents a topography of a distinctly morainic character, but its outlines and distribution are so irregular as almost to defy description in words.

Read that against the sentence at the top of this piece and the two do not quite agree. Dryer puts the whole county on one lobe's side of the seam. Leverett names a moraine after the county seat precisely because two lobes met there, and puts a moraine of the Erie lobe in the southern part of the county.

The thing that reconciles them is Dryer's own hedge. He allowed one exception, the south-east corner, and the south-east corner is where the other lobe turns out to have been. Twenty-one years separate a man saying this ground almost defies description from a government survey describing it and putting the town's name on it.

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The lakes belong to the same seam, and the state counted them before it measured them.

About forty in this county had been thought worth naming on the maps then in print, with something near four thousand acres of water in all, fifteen hundred of it in Johnson Township alone. Twenty-two were visited. This paper has already counted them twice over and found the county's own books agreeing on thirty-five, and the state's surveyors were doing a different job: they were looking for marl to burn into cement, and they sounded the lakes to find it.

One thing worth saying plainly, because the name is a good one and it belongs to the next county south. Dryer gave the language the term "esker lake", for a lake whose shape depends on a gravel ridge left by a stream running under the ice. He did it at High Lake and Gordys Lake, in Noble County, not here.

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What this county got instead was the name on the seam.

The village at the junction was the county seat. Battey's county history of 1882 has the county building and furnishing a new court house there from 1878 to 1881, and three newspapers published there in October 1881, the Standard among them. Across the years the ice was being worked out, its population held flat: the federal census counted 1,784 people in 1890, 1,703 in 1900 and 1,772 in 1910. It is on the map in Washington because of where the two lobes stopped against each other. The knobs and the tamarack swamps in the north-west, the two hundred feet of sand and gravel under the jail, the coal carried down from Michigan, and the Haw Patch that made the farms are all one event, and the county's own histories, which are very good on who arrived when, do not mention it once.