The first raised in the State of Indiana

The county history published in 1882 says, in its chapter on Clearspring Township, that In 1846, Hawley Peck began the growing of mint and manufacture of oil, which became quite an industry in the township. The oil was canned and shipped east, or sold to buyers who came to collect it, at anything from $1.25 to $5 a pound. The township's mint was worth between $5,000 and $10,000 a year.

Peck's biography, at the back of the same book, gives no year and makes a larger claim.

The staple product of his early farming was peppermint, and his was the first raised in the State of Indiana.

Five pages before the mint, the same chapter says this of Charles Roy, who came to the township in 1836.

He was also one of the first to raise mint and distill the oil, and came to do an extensive business in this line.

On the mint page itself it names Roy and Erastus Nelson among the earliest and most extensive growers. The book holds both claims, Peck first in the state and Roy one of the first, and never sets them against each other.

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Ira Ford's history of 1920 repeats the 1882 sentence almost word for word: In 1846, Hawley Peck began the growing of mint and making peppermint oil. A few lines further down the same page, it says this.

It was he who brought from Constantine, Michigan, in a sack, the first peppermint roots ever planted out in LaGrange County soil. This was about 1847.

Taken as printed, the first roots ever planted in the county arrive a year after the growing began.

Ford changes other things. The claim is no longer the state's: Peck is The first man to introduce this industry into LaGrange County. Roy and Nelson are still there, as Other large growers and dealers in mint, and Roy is no longer one of the first. And the roots have acquired a sack and a town.

Constantine does appear in the 1882 history, once. Erastus Nelson's biography says he came to the township in 1847 and grew peppermint, finding a market for his crops at Constantine, Mich.

The county's centennial history of 1928 gives no year at all. Peck settled in 1838 in section 27. Ten years after he brought peppermint roots from Michigan, which would make it about 1848. It names no town in Michigan. And it puts Roy after him: After this peppermint was grown by Charles Roy, and five others.

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The books do not agree on where the oil went, either. Peck's 1882 biography says he found a profitable market for this commodity at Ontario, N. Y., to which place he went, via Fort Wayne, ten different times. Ford says that one year he took a thousand pounds of oil to Fort Wayne, and then by rail and canal to Phillips, New York, where he realized $5,000 for it. That is two places in New York for one man's oil, and nothing in either book joins them.

The 1882 history says the township's mint ran at its thousands of dollars a year until within the last few years, when the industry has been discontinued. Ford, in 1920, has peppermint still grown in large amounts in Clay and Eden townships and elsewhere in the county.

It is now worth $6 per pound. One farmer in 1919 has grown $300 worth from a single acre of land.

Thirty-seven years lie between the 1882 page and Ford's farmer of 1919, and no page says what happened in them.

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In 1882 Peck's was the first peppermint raised in the State of Indiana. In 1920 he was the first man to bring it into LaGrange County. In 1928 he started the industry here. No book says how the first of those was known.