Where this comes from

Almost everything on this site was written out of two books.

They were made forty years apart, by different people, for different reasons, and they disagree with each other constantly. That disagreement is not a flaw in them. It is most of what makes them useful, and it is why the pieces here keep stopping to say which book said what.

Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana: Historical and Biographical. Published in Chicago by F. A. Battey and Company in 1882.

It runs to more than four hundred pages on this county alone. There is a chapter for each of the eleven townships, chapters on the county's organisation, its roads and churches and schools, and its part in the Civil War, and then several hundred pages of biographical sketches of individual residents.

Different chapters were written by different men, and every chapter in the volume is signed. Two of the signatures are Rericks. Dr. J. H. Rerick, M. D. signed the four county-wide chapters: the physical features, the organisation, the roads and churches and schools, and the war. R. H. Rerick signed five township chapters: Eden, Newbury, Van Buren, Clay and Clearspring. Weston A. Goodspeed signed Lima, Johnson, Springfield, Greenfield and Milford. John Paul Jones signed the Town of LaGrange and Bloomfield, and was the same Reverend John Paul Jones who presided as county recorder at the laying of the courthouse cornerstone in 1878.

The two Rericks are not the same signature and this site does not treat them as one. John H. Rerick was a surgeon of the Forty-fourth Indiana who owned the LaGrange Standard from 1867. Ford's 1920 history names R. H. Rerick as the author of the Eden Township chapter, and records a Rowland H. Rerick who published the Standard from 1907 and owned it from 1914. Nothing in either volume says what the two men were to each other, and nothing in either says who wrote a chapter except the byline under its heading.

This page said something different until August 2026. It assigned thirteen chapters to three men and gave Dr. J. H. Rerick the five township chapters signed R. H. Rerick. The count above comes from reading the byline under all sixteen chapter headings rather than from any source that lists them, because no such list exists in the book.

Their chapters read differently, and one of them, writing about Susan Griggs at Wolcottville, breaks off from the history entirely to ask the town not to let her die in poverty.

The volume carries twenty-one engraved portrait plates and two engraved views, the courthouse and the jail.

Its preface says how it was made. In the year before publication, the company called on upward of three thousand people across the two counties, asking them to contribute from their recollections, from carefully preserved letters, from scraps of manuscript and printed fragments and memoranda. It addresses its readers as patrons and says the volume has come up to the standard of its promises.

So a man's biography here is, in most cases, an account he gave of himself to somebody who came to the door. What the book does not say anywhere is how the twenty-one men with portraits were chosen, and this site does not guess.

The book is out of copyright. The full text and the page scans are free on the Internet Archive.

History of Northeast Indiana: LaGrange, Steuben, Noble and DeKalb Counties. By Ira Ford, two volumes, 1920.

Ford covered four counties where Battey covered two, so LaGrange gets less room. Volume one is the history, arranged by county and then by township, with general chapters on schools, churches, railroads, banks and the county's war record, plus a chronology and a list of every village plat filed since the county was organised. Volume two is biography, and it is not organised at all: entries run one after another with no county or chapter divisions.

Ford drew on the earlier book. He says so directly in his Eden Township chapter, where he notes that he was permitted to draw on Rerick's account. He does not say so anywhere else, but the reuse is measurable, and on this site it is measured.

Where Ford is repeating Battey, the two agreeing proves nothing. Where Ford is writing about something that happened after 1882, he is a genuine second source and often the only one. The pieces here try to keep that distinction visible.

Also out of copyright, also free on the Internet Archive.

The people who made the 1882 book said so themselves, in the preface.

They wrote that the conflicting statements, the discrepancies and the fallible and incomplete nature of public documents were almost appalling to their historians and biographers. That members of the same families disagree as to the spelling of the family name, and contradict each other as to dates of birth, of settlement in the county, and other matters of fact. That in this entangled condition they had given preference to the preponderance of authority, while acknowledging the existence of errors and their inability to furnish a perfect history.

That is a publisher in 1882 describing the problem this site was built around.

The other reason is that the two books were made differently.

Battey's men were canvassing a county in 1882 and writing down what people told them, forty and fifty years after the events. Ford was one man in 1920 compiling four counties, working partly from the earlier book and partly from records and people still living.

So the disagreements are usually not one book being wrong. They are two different distances from the same event.

A few examples from pieces on this site. Battey dates a saw mill to 1834 in a biography and 1833 in a chapter. Battey and Ford give four different accounts of how long one man served as county commissioner. Ford gives three different dates in one volume for when Haw Patch became Topeka. Battey says a man advocated positions like the minority in the Dred Scott decision and Ford says the majority, which reverses the claim entirely.

Where those conflicts turn up, the pieces here state them and leave them open rather than picking one and moving on. A piece that quietly resolves a conflict is telling you something the record does not support.

Sanborn fire insurance maps, made by a New York company that surveyed towns building by building so underwriters could price the risk of them burning. Nineteen editions exist for five towns in this county, between 1883 and 1933. They record what every storefront sold, what each building was made of, and what a town had to fight a fire with. Library of Congress, public domain.

The Historic American Buildings Survey, a federal programme that measures and draws historic buildings. It has recorded exactly one building in this county, a store in Mongo built in 1832.

Photographs from the Library of Congress, including a 2016 survey of the county by Carol M. Highsmith, whose archive she dedicated to public use.

The 1850 Indiana constitutional convention debates, published in full at the time, which is how this site knows what one LaGrange County delegate actually said on the floor rather than what a later book said about it.

Local history that is not in any book. Markers, museum displays, and people who know things the published histories missed. The town of Shipshewana was two towns before it was one, and neither county history records that. It is on a marker at Main and Morton, put up in the year 2000 by the descendants of both founding families.

That is the kind of thing the published record does not hold, and it is a large part of why this site exists.

Every date, name, and claim about a specific family or business is checked against two independent sources before it is stated flat. Where there is only one source, the piece says so. Where a claim comes from someone's memory rather than a written record, the piece says that too, and publishes it anyway. Family memory is real history. It is a different kind of evidence and it deserves to be labelled honestly rather than dressed up as a document.

Sources are listed at the bottom of every piece.

Corrections are public and dated, at the bottom of the piece they belong to. We do not quietly edit something and pretend it always said that.

This site does not publish posed or identifying photographs of Amish or Old Order individuals, whoever offers them. Buildings, land, and streets, yes. People who did not ask to be photographed, no.

If we have something wrong, tell us. That is not a complaint. It is a contribution, and the archive is better for it.