The Haw Patch had everything but a town

The southeast quarter of Eden Township is a broad stretch of ground that early settlers called the Haw Patch.

The soil was rich, the land level or gently rolling, and there were no marshes in it. It was heavily forested with sugar maple and black walnut and remarkably free of underbrush, except for hawthorn and wild grape. There was so much hawthorn that people named the place after it.

Robert Latta heard about it by accident.

He was a farmer near Urbana, Ohio, and in 1830 he came to Goshen to bring medicine and supplies to his son Johnston, who was practicing medicine there. While he was in Goshen he met surveyors who had been through LaGrange County, and they told him about the Haw Patch land. He detoured on the way home to look at it.

He already had a good farm under cultivation in Ohio. The county history published in 1882 says he longed for new forests to conquer.

In the spring of 1832 he came back with his wife and his daughter Achsah and built a log house on Section 26. That autumn William McConnell arrived from Ohio and settled on Section 35, just south, with his wife Agnes, four sons, and a daughter.

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The two families did not get along, and the county history is direct about why.

Latta was a Whig and a Methodist. McConnell was a Democrat and a Presbyterian. Both were public spirited, both were prominent, and a rivalry started almost immediately.

It showed up in land.

Each man ended up owning about eighteen separate eighty acre tracts. That is roughly fourteen hundred acres apiece, and the county history notes dryly that it was considerably more forest land than was profitable to own in those days.

So they gave a lot of it away. Eighty acres went to one man as payment for a year's work. Another sizeable piece went to somebody in exchange for a job of rail splitting.

By the fall of 1835 there were fifteen households in the whole township and seventy-two people counting every man, woman, and child.

Two of them competed by buying a quarter of the county.

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Each family opened a burying ground.

The county history, writing fifty years later, records that the McConnell family graveyard lies just across the road from the one Robert Latta established, and where he now rests. It calls this a suggestive fact and leaves it there.

Thomas C. McConnell went into the ground first, in 1836, at twenty-six. William McConnell followed in 1848 at sixty-seven, Agnes in 1851 at sixty-six, and then their sons and a later generation after them. By 1882 there was no McConnell left living in the township, and the graveyard still took one now and then.

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The first years were bad in a way that has nothing to do with either family.

The weeds defied the farmers. They choked the grain and covered everything, and the county history says horses and cattle were sometimes lost in them. The birds came to the little wheat patches in numbers, making music all day and helping themselves.

Between the weeds and the birds, the question of what the harvest would be was a serious one.

There was no mill in the township. Grain went to Clearspring, or into Noble County, or to Benton in Elkhart County, and the trip to Benton with fifteen or twenty bushels took a day out and a day back.

Then the land started doing what the land does there. Wheat came in at twenty bushels an acre and corn at fifty, and it has been like that since.

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For a while the Haw Patch was a dangerous place to be after dark.

A gang of horse thieves and general outlaws worked the region, moving stolen horses out of the county along regular lines with harborers stationed permanently at each stop. The reputation stuck to the whole area for years afterward.

In January of 1858 the Regulator companies of two counties paraded at Kendallville, and an immense crowd turned out. One of the criminals was seized there and hanged ten days later near Diamond Lake in Noble County.

His body was taken back to his wife.

Five weeks after that, on the first of March, the neighbors here organized. They met at Francis Ditman's house and formed the Clearspring and Eden Detective Police, with Abner Lewis as president. People called them the Regulators too.

The county history says the criminal class was awed, arrests were made quickly, and the country was quiet in a very short time.

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The only business place in the township was a village that people called Slabtown.

It was also called Haw Patch Center and Haw Patch, but the most popular name was Slabtown, and the 1882 history gives the sawmill the credit for it. William McConnell, whom the same history calls the first postmaster, had a few goods for sale close by in the early years. Timothy Hudson kept a store on the Clearspring side of the line. There was a mill, and by 1881 two stores, a blacksmith and wagon shop, and a harness shop and a brick house, both put up that year.

It had never been platted.

In 1872 a survey came through for an extension of the Canada Southern Railroad. There was talk of putting the railroad shops there. A man named Thomas H. Gale came down from Michigan and bought over a section of improved land at high prices, betting on it.

The panic of 1873 came instead.

Writing in 1882, the county historian said there was now little hope of a railroad through the Haw Patch. In the same paragraph he wrote that Slabtown had never had the distinction of being platted, but that this was among the bright prospects of the future.

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What the Haw Patch built instead was a hall.

A debating society had been meeting at the schoolhouse since about 1865. In 1878 the members decided to make something permanent of it, got a charter, and called it the Sycamore Literary Society. Two of them, Ira Ford and J. N. Babcock, had the idea that the society should own a building.

The old Dunkard church was for sale. They bought it, tore it down, moved it, and rebuilt it in 1879 at the corners on land donated by Orvin Kent. The finished hall was thirty by fifty-two feet, seated three hundred fifty, and had a stage and scenery.

They borrowed five hundred dollars from a bank in Ligonier to do it.

Then they paid it back in two years by putting on plays, holding entertainments, and running a lecture course. The speakers they brought in included T. DeWitt Talmage and Schuyler Colfax, who had been Vice President of the United States six years earlier.

Interest and principal, in two years, in a place called Slabtown.

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The railroad came eventually. The Wabash built through the southern part of the county, the village was platted at last, and the town took a name.

It took it from Topeka, Kansas.