Wise enough to get rid of the stock

Before it was planked it was mud, and the mud is the reason.

Everything grown along that line for sixty miles north of Fort Wayne went to Fort Wayne to be sold, because Fort Wayne was where the canal was. And the road there was, in the 1920 history's words, in generally bad condition through the wilderness.

So some time about the year 1847, in the county history's own hedge, a company of wealthy men at Fort Wayne and along the road put together a capital stock of about seventy thousand dollars to plank it.

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Money was short, so they took payment in goods.

Stock in the corporation was payable in almost any kind of salable merchandise, as money was scarce, and William Mitchell, of Kendallville was selected to superintend the business of exchange.

The road was leased by the company for a term of years, pursuant to a law of the state, and the book does not say who leased it to them. They built sawmills the whole way along it to cut the plank. One at Kendallville, one at South Milford in 1848, another near Swan about 1850 which the company sold immediately to a man who contracted to saw the plank for them.

The plank was three-inch oak, laid on sills at right angles to the direction of travel. Fifty miles of it, sawed and laid in 1847 and 1848.

Then tollgates every six to ten miles, and superintendents of sections who lived along the line and kept their stretch in repair.

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One place was asked to pay for it and refused.

The road came up from Fort Wayne as far as Kendallville, and the people along the Mongoquinong road, which is the old Lima road, were asked to contribute toward continuing it their way.

...but they thought the road had to go that way, and far-seeing men on the line through South Milford and to Union Mills, in LaGrange County, held out inducements, and the planks were laid on that line, which opened a more direct road to Kendallville from the north as well.

They declined because they believed they had no competition. The planks went the other way: north from Kendallville through Milford, past the Fourier Association grounds in Springfield Township, to Union Mills, which is Mongo, and then west to Ontario.

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For two or three years it was the best road anybody here had used.

The 1920 history calls it a wonderful benefit that opened up the country. The 1882 history calls it famous. It carried the mail, which had gone on horseback before. It carried the county's grain to Fort Wayne, where the canal was, and one man recorded in his own sketch that the trip took him three days.

Then the plank began to decay, and the county history has one word for what it became.

Traveling upon it was splendid for two or three years, until the plank began to decay. Then it became execrable.

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The stock had already started going the other way.

A few small dividends were struck, but the road failed to repay the stockholders for the outlay of construction, and the stock steadily depreciated in value.

And then the sentence this piece is named for.

Many of the largest stockholders at Fort Wayne and along the road were wise enough to get rid of the stock to Eastern capitalists, upon whom much of the burden of failure fell when the enterprise collapsed.

Wise enough. The county historian is describing men who knew what they were holding, sold it to people who did not, and he approves.

It sits four sentences after the dividends. The book records the insiders taking a payout and then getting out, and does not notice that it has said so.

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Nobody local is recorded as having lost anything.

That is worth setting beside the railroad, twenty years later, where the same volume names Richard Thompson of Clay putting his property into stock that fell to fifteen cents, and Charles Woodruff at Albion ruined financially.

For the plank road there is not one named loser in either book. A Mr. Nichols put two hundred dollars into it in 1851 and four hundred into the railroad afterward, and his sketch goes on to say he owns four hundred and forty acres and is worth about thirty-two thousand dollars. Everyone else the record names was paid: two contractors, a man who bought the company's sawmill and sawed its plank, a family that kept a tollgate, a man who kept six miles of it.

The losers are named once and they are somewhere else. Eastern capitalists.

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The tolls ran until about 1858. Then the company handed the road to the county commissioners, and the county had it.

Ontario, at the north end, kept it about ten or twelve years altogether.

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There is one more thing about that road and neither book puts it in the same chapter as the rest.

The old plank-road was extensively traveled in early years, especially after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, by colored fugitives from the Southern States on their way to Canada. They were assisted on their way by S. Whitford, John Longyear, old man Waterhouse, and several others along the road.

Longyear is the man who kept six miles of it. He was also the first postmaster on it, at an office called Marseilles.

So a section man who was paid by a stock company to maintain a toll road was helping people north along the stretch he maintained, past gates that were there to charge for passage.

This archive has already written about Waterhouse and the Whitfords, and about the chain of houses running north from Noble County into Michigan. What no source says, and what took putting two chapters side by side, is that the chain ran along a road somebody owned.

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