Thirty-five lakes

This county had thirty-five lakes, from two or three acres up to six hundred, and one township held fifteen of them. Two books counted them and both got thirty-five. The third, written after the ditching, gave no number at all.

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Johnson Township has about fifteen lakes in it, wholly or partly, and no other township in this county comes close.

Oliver is the largest, over six hundred acres with Olin beside it, though the 1882 county history spells it Olen and calls it an appendage rather than a lake, so the six hundred is the pair. It puts Adams at about three hundred and twenty, and Atwood at about two hundred and fifty. And then the long narrow one that runs three miles end to end and carries four names along its length, Witmer and Westler and Third and Dallas, several hundred acres between them.

Several of them have fine gravelly or sandy shores, and all of them, the same book says, are bordered by beautiful clusters of oak, maple or beech.

Elsewhere: Nauvoo east of Wolcottville. Shipshewana, the biggest of the ones draining into the Pigeon. Wall and Cedar and Twin and Stone along the northern line, which the same book calls the finest small bodies of water in the region. Fish and Cline and Sloan in Bloomfield. Grass, shared between two townships. Buck in Clay. Still in Lima. Blackmun and Pretty and Long and the two Turkeys and the Lake of the Woods in Milford.

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Somebody was selling the view before anybody built on it.

The best-known case is the village of Vistula, platted on Wall Lake in 1836 and never built. It was not the only one.

In February of 1837, a man named George Lotterer took land on the shore of Shipshewana Lake and laid out a village he called Georgetown. Ford's history disposes of it in seven words. It "proved to be only a paper town."

Two lakeshore villages platted within a year of each other, both sold on the strength of the water, and neither one built.

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The lakes that did get used were put to work.

There was a mill near Shipshewana Lake by 1834, three years before Georgetown. A steam sawmill at what they called Lake Shore, near Hood Lake, in 1870, with a schoolhouse and a Mennonite church on the shore. And at Still Lake in Lima Township, in 1836, a distillery doing what the record calls a flourishing business.

The holiday came later, and it came with the railway. There is no resort of any kind in this county in the 1882 history. The only one it mentions is Klinger's Lake, over the line in Michigan, on the Lake Shore Railway. By 1893 Island Park at Wolcottville is already famous and there is a summer resort projected at Twin Lakes. By 1920 Shipshewana has private cottages, boats and bath houses.

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What worried the county in 1882 was not the water. It was the fish.

Many of the lakes, however, are becoming depopulated of their finny habitants, and every disciple of gentle Isaac Walton should urge some measure to restore their former attractiveness in this respect.

Bass, pickerel, perch, sunfish and catfish, and they were running out. The remedy the county historian proposes is that anglers ought to want something done about it.

Eleven years later the county atlas answers him, and the answer is the federal government.

The resources of the United States Fish Commission are freely used to maintain an abundant population of valuable fish.

By then the county was advertising itself as the Eden between the Lakes, and claiming that no better resort for bass fishing could be found anywhere.

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Which brings up the counting.

In 1882 the county history opens its description of the water with a number.

The lakes, of which there are thirty-five, of all areas, from two or three to 500 or 600 acres, are the most attractive natural features of the county.

Eleven years later the atlas gives the same number.

Thirty-five lakes are among the most attractive features of the natural scenery.

And in 1920, after fifty years of ditching, Ira Ford describes the same lakes, gives Oliver at over six hundred acres and Adams second and Witmer and Atwood not much less, and then writes this.

The drainage of the county, however, has greatly reduced the size of many of the lakes.

He does not say which. He does not say by how much. And he does not count them.

Only one lake in this county is written up as gone, and Ford does it in three clauses and the past tense, without ever saying the drainage took it.

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Five years after Ford declined to say by how much, somebody came and measured three of them.

The State of Indiana's Department of Conservation sent W. M. Tucker, an associate professor of geology at Indiana University, to sound the lakes to the foot. Three sheets survive for this county, drawn in white on blueprint, contoured every five feet, with a scale bar and a code for swamp and vegetation and cottages, and a block of figures in the corner.

The state's 1925 chart of Oliver Lake gives it 371.15 acres and ninety-one feet at its deepest. The chart of Adam Lake, which the 1882 book spells Adams, gives 292.89 acres and the same ninety-one feet. The chart of Big Long Lake gives 365.75 acres and eighty-two feet.

The third one is the one to stop on. Big Long is Milford's Long Lake, which this piece has already named in a list without a size, and whose outlet Colonel Cochran dammed in 1836. None of these books gives it an acreage. The state gives it 365.75, which puts it second of the three and ahead of Adams, in an account that never ranked it at all.

The Oliver sheet does something else. It letters Olin as a lake of its own and stops the depth contours at Oliver's shore, which is the 1882 book's appendage getting its name back forty-three years later.

Each sheet is signed, which is the part Ford's sentence has no room for.

Surveyed by W. M. Tucker, Assoc. Professor of Geology, Indiana University, 1925. Lester H. Wise, Student Assistant.

Two books counted this county's lakes and both got thirty-five. The third says they are smaller and gives no figure at all. In 1882 a lake here is scenery and the worry is the fish; by 1893 it is an asset and the government is stocking it; by 1920 it is smaller, and the book that says so does not name one, number them, or call it a loss.