Indian Lakes Marketing

09/05/2026

Wolcott Mills Festival today. Here’s the man the mills were named for: George Wolcott came to Wolcottville in 1837 and built the mills the town grew up around.

George Wolcott came to the southern line of Johnson Township in March of 1837, put up a log house, and went back to Ohio for his family. He was thirty and he had money.

He dug a millrace half a mile long by hand. Then a sawmill, then a set of buhrs, then a store, then a gristmill, then a school he paid for himself and hired the teachers into. At one point the county history has him running seven trades at the same time, with twenty men working for him and fifteen buildings in the village he rented out or sold as people needed them.

He sold all of it in about 1851 and died six years later, at fifty.

In May of 1895 the fire insurance surveyors came to Wolcottville and drew the mill on the race. They lettered his name across it, with another man's underneath as proprietor. They did it again in 1901. That is forty-four years after he was buried.

By 1907 it is gone from the sheet, and the town has his name still.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/builders/seven-occupations-at-once

09/05/2026

For all those interested in checking out the Wolcott Mill Festival today in Wolcottville, see the rundown of the festivities below.

09/04/2026

When this county sent its men to the Civil War, they walked to Fort Wayne. There was no railroad yet.

Nobody here had seen a soldier. The county history says not ten men in it had ever smelled gunpowder, and exactly one knew how to drill a company: William Bingham, who had learned it in Mexico. They filled the courthouse, made speeches, and a doctor pulled an enlistment paper out of his pocket that he had already written.

Over the next four years about fourteen hundred men went. Then, in the militia return of October 1862, between the exempts and the total subject to draft, the state counted ninety-one more who had said they would not.

The county's own history of the war runs eleven thousand words and never explains who they were.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/history/ninety-one-men

09/04/2026

09/04/2026

Dig into the early history of when the Amish arrived in LaGrange County.

The Amish came to LaGrange County in 1844: two men on horseback, two months out from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, who stopped at Davis's place and bought farms.

By 1920 there were seven congregations here and about eighteen hundred people in them. Every one of the seven had split off from the one before it, not over any quarrel but because a congregation had got too large to meet in a house. The Forks divided in 1866, again in 1876, again in 1881, again in 1901.

Both of the county's histories wrote about them, thirty-eight years apart. One was written by a LaGrange physician who explained what these people failed to see. The other was written by a man who married into a Newbury Amish family, and who opened by saying the names had been confusing to people without.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/history/to-people-without

09/04/2026

For the hour before bed. Greg spent years as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist watching people struggle to wind down. Silent Night Sleep Spray came out of that.

The Quiet Hours Box builds the rest of the evening around it. The sleep spray, our Soft Night Lip Balm in lavender and chamomile, and a magnesium cream in a 9 oz size we make only for this box. Our standard jar is 4 oz, which is fine for occasional use. Nine ounces is enough to make it part of your night, every night, for a month.

One box is $72, or three months for $177 (save $39).

Pre-order now, ships September 22.

bloomfieldschoolhouselavender.com/products/the-quiet-hours-box

09/03/2026

Four boxes. Four seasons.We are not stopping at fall. Every season we will build a new box around a new scent, made once and not repeated. The chai will be gone by winter. Whatever comes next will be gone by spring. That is on purpose.

The Seasonal Box sends you one automatically, four times a year, at $72 a box instead of $80. No remembering to order, and no worrying about the hundred selling out before you get to it.

This fall it is the Chai box. Winter comes in December, and we are not telling you what is in it yet.

bloomfieldschoolhouselavender.com/products/the-seasonal-box

09/03/2026

Did you know the wh**ky trade in LaGrange County started in 1829, in a cabin at Lima? It grew into at least six distilleries, and by the 1840s the biggest employer Lima ever had was one of them.

In 1829 a man walked into a cabin at Lima, pledged his blanket for a drink of wh**ky, and took it back off the roof without paying. The woman running the barrel poured three pails of water in it to make up the loss.

That is where the drink trade starts in this county's history, and it does not stay small. By the 1840s Lima's largest employer was a distillery: twelve men, twenty thousand bushels of grain a year, its own cooperage, and two hundred hogs fed on the mash. There were at least six stills in the county. One lake is still called Still Lake because of the one built on its bank.

The same county history calls this a very temperate people.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/history/a-very-temperate-people

09/02/2026

Hot off the presses! The Potawatomi were here long before the county was. Its own histories give them a single clause.

Everyone knows the Potawatomi were here before the county was. What's harder to find out is what happened to them, because the county's own histories barely say.

Between them, four volumes give the removal four different years. Not one of them names a treaty, a payment or a reserve for this ground. The 1893 atlas records it in a single clause, sixth of seven entries for 1837, between a Baptist church organising and a road being laid out. Ford's 1920 history gives the whole year seven words and no destination.

What they do record, at length, is the wh**ky trade, a corn crop, and a village name nobody could translate.

This piece is about what the record holds and what it doesn't.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/history/one-clause

09/01/2026

Hot off the presses! Dig into the history of when the railroad made its way to LaGrange County.

When this county sent its men to the Civil War, they walked to Fort Wayne. There was no railroad.

The first locomotive reached LaGrange from Sturgis on 11 April 1870, to a cannon, a band, flags, and a dinner laid on at the hotels for the track layers. The county had paid for it: about a hundred thousand dollars subscribed by people along the line, one at a time. The stock reached ten cents on the dollar. Few, if any, who took it complained.

Other towns waited. Clearspring was promised a line twice and got neither. The Haw Patch had railroad shops talked of and a speculator buying a whole section at high figures, and then the panic of 1873 came instead. Newbury's hopes were raised by a survey and sunk by its failure, twice.

And Van Buren, which had been flourishing and promising, got one clause in the county history explaining its entire history: it would have fulfilled all its early promise had it not been for the perverse running of the railway too far to the north.

https://www.lagrangecountygazette.com/history/too-far-to-the-north