Who was John B. Howe?

Howe, Ind. In the winter of 1909 the little town of Lima, in LaGrange County, was at war with itself over its own name. Half the town wanted it changed to Howe, after the military school that had become, as one paper put it, “the chief asset of the town.” The other half, led by the businessmen, wanted to stay Lima. A post office inspector came out from Washington and sided with the school. Then, in April, Senator Albert J. Beveridge refused to approve the change.

Eleven weeks later, on 23 June 1909, the post office at Lima became the post office at Howe anyway, and has been ever since.

The school was named for John Badlam Howe, the town’s first lawyer, a Boston-born banker who wrote books about money and left his house and ten thousand dollars to the Episcopal Church. The county histories call him “one of the clearest and most profound thinkers ever in Northern Indiana.” They also get his most important stand exactly backwards.

A Boston boy at the county seat

Howe came from a family of New England clergymen and soldiers. His father, the Rev. James Blake Howe, was a Harvard man and an Episcopal priest; his mother, Sally Adams Badlam, was the daughter of Gen. Stephen Badlam, who in 1776, as a major of artillery, took the height on Lake Champlain that was named Mount Independence because he took it on the Fourth of July. Documented

He entered Trinity College in Hartford at sixteen and graduated at nineteen, in 1832. That autumn he went west to Detroit, then to Marshall, Michigan, where he read law, and in 1833 he arrived at the brand-new seat of LaGrange County, on the prairie the Potawatomi called Mongoquinong, where a large Potawatomi village had stood. The settlement took the name Lima the next year. Documented

He did not start as a lawyer. In 1833, in a log schoolhouse a quarter of a mile southeast of the village, with three or four small windows, a huge fireplace and eighteen or twenty pupils, John B. Howe taught the first school in the county, for ten or twelve dollars a month. Documented

And he failed his first bar examination. He applied in the fall of 1833 and, as he told it himself, “failed of admission … because I failed in some answers to some of the most technical questions upon that, in some aspects, most technical of all subjects, the statute of uses.” He studied for six more months and was admitted in the spring of 1834, the first resident lawyer of the LaGrange County bar. Documented

Town-maker

Lima was a place where a young man with a law book could help draw the map. In February 1836 a cattle drover from Ohio named Wesley Park met Howe at Lima. That spring the two of them went south into the new county of DeKalb, chose a site on Cedar Creek where two trails crossed, and laid out a village. Park entered the land; Howe helped persuade the commissioners to make it the county seat. The plat of Auburn is dated 21 April 1836, and it stayed in Howe’s hands until it was finally recorded in 1879. Documented

He wanted a road, too. On 20 January 1835 he wrote to Lewis Cass, then Secretary of War, asking for federal money to survey a highway from Vistula, the village that became Toledo, to Chicago, which would have passed through LaGrange County. As he remembered it in 1882, Congress gave twenty thousand dollars for the survey on 3 March 1835, about half of it was spent, and the road was never built. Documented The statute books tell it a little differently. The road money came on 30 June 1834, seven months before his letter: ten thousand dollars toward a territorial road “from Vistula, westwardly, to the Indiana state line, in the direction of Chicago.” The roads act of 3 March 1835 names no such road. Documented Whatever his letter did, it was not the first ask. Reading

He served one term in the legislature, elected in 1840 for the counties of Steuben, DeKalb, Noble and LaGrange. In 1854 he and the merchant Samuel P. Williams founded the La Grange Bank at Lima, which became a branch of the State Bank of Indiana and then, in 1862, a national bank; Howe left the law for banking. When fire destroyed the east side of Lima’s business street, Howe, Williams and two partners rebuilt it in 1860, and Howe and Williams built the Kingsbury House hotel. Documented

“A Constitution is made for the benefit of the minority”

In 1850 Indiana rewrote its constitution, and LaGrange sent Howe to the convention in Indianapolis. One of the questions that stirred the most passion there was whether to forbid Black people from moving into the state at all. Documented

On Monday, 18 November 1850, under the convention’s brand-new half-hour rule, Howe rose to speak against it a second time. Along the way he answered the delegate who had proposed that Black people who entered the state illegally be sold to the highest bidder, which Howe called “the very next thing to the adoption of slavery itself.” Then he said this: Documented

“Other gentlemen seem to think that Constitutions are to embody whatever suits the will of the majority; but if my reflections have been of any service to me, a Constitution is made for the benefit of the minority—to protect the rights of the minority against the aggressions and the power of a triumphant majority. Of what use and validity is a Constitution unless the object be to protect the weak?” Documented

His argument was a lawyer’s, not a crusader’s. He conceded that a state could keep out paupers, and he drew fine lines between “social” and “political” rights, and between full citizens and citizens “sub modo.” But his conclusion was plain. Black men could be citizens of New York and Massachusetts, and such citizens, “under the Constitution of the United States, cannot be debarred of the privilege of entering into any other State of the Union, or of the right of acquiring and holding property there.” Documented

He lost. On Thursday, 23 January 1851, the convention voted 94 to 36 to engross the section forbidding Black people to come into or settle in Indiana; Howe voted no. Minutes later he voted to table the next section, which voided contracts with Black newcomers and fined anyone who employed them. The next day he voted with the majority to put the article to the voters separately, which let them reject it without rejecting the whole constitution. Documented In August 1851 Indiana’s voters approved it overwhelmingly; only four of the state’s ninety-one counties voted against it. Documented

Six years later the Supreme Court took up the same question in the Dred Scott case. The majority held that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States; the two dissenters, Justices Curtis and McLean, answered that free Black men had been citizens of several states, New York and Massachusetts among them, since before the Constitution. Documented Howe’s argument of 1850 is the dissenters’ argument. Reading

The county history of 1882, written while Howe was alive and quoting his own reminiscences elsewhere, put it correctly: in 1850, “as a Whig, [he] advocated measures regarding the slave, identical with those afterward adhered to by the minority of Justices in the Dred Scott decision.” When the 1920 History of Northeast Indiana reprinted the same sketch, almost word for word, “minority” had become “majority,” and the man who argued for Black citizenship was made to stand with Chief Justice Taney. Documented The debates and the roll call settle which is right. New finding

The money man

Howe spent his last years writing about money. Between 1878 and 1882 he published six books and pamphlets, among them The Political Economy of Great Britain, the United States and France in the Use of Money and The Common Sense, the Mathematics, and the Metaphysics of Money. Documented The liveliest is Monetary and Industrial Fallacies: A Dialogue (1878), a debate among a skilled workman looking for work, who wants the national banks wound up; two economists; and a banker who speaks for the author. Documented

The house

In 1875–76 the Howes built the house in the picture, a white-brick mansion in the Italianate and Second Empire styles designed by the architect Julius Barrows, with a tower and a glass conservatory. Documented It was called one of the finest homes in the state. What it cost depends on whom you ask: some $40,000, a newspaper said in 1883; worth some $25,000, the diocese said the same year. Documented It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, and in 2019 Indiana Landmarks named the “Howe Mansion” one of the state’s ten most endangered places. Documented

The will

John B. Howe died at Lima on Monday, 22 January 1883, of apoplexy, a stroke. Documented He was sixty-nine. He and Frances had no children. His will, recorded on 2 February, left most of an estate the papers put at some $450,000 to his widow, his brothers and his sister, and the rest to the church. Documented

About the house he wrote: “This property may perhaps be advantageously used as a residence during part of the season at least, by the Bishop of the Diocese. I advise that it be used for this purpose, and that if sold, it be sold if possible for the use of a Church-school, or for some purpose which will benefit the Church.” Frances was to have it for her life. Documented

He also left the bishop ten thousand dollars, “to be invested until by means of interest or other donations, or both, the fund amounts to $50,000,” for “a training school for educating young men for the ministry of our Church.” Documented A codicil remembered Nashotah House, the Episcopal seminary in Wisconsin. Documented

Four acres and an old homestead

The diocese had no bishop when Howe died. In June 1883 the same convention that heard of his legacy elected David Buel Knickerbacker, a Minneapolis rector who believed in church schools. Documented

He did not wait for the fund to reach fifty thousand dollars. A year later he told the convention that Frances Howe had agreed “to set apart her old homestead, which she and her husband, of honored memory, had occupied for thirty years, together with four acres of ground, for a boys’ school,” to begin “in a humble way” as the Howe Grammar School, with room for twelve boarders. Documented The rector, the Rev. Charles N. Spalding, later wrote down how it began: “This school was opened on the 2d of September, 1884. … It opened with two pupils proper, and with two young men who were to pursue theological study.” By the end of the first year nine pupils had enrolled. Documented

That settles an old disagreement. Some histories say the school opened with four boys, others with two. Both are half right: four students arrived in September 1884, but only two were schoolboys; the other two were divinity students, the training-school part of Howe’s bequest in miniature. New finding

It grew quickly. Frances deeded the four acres to the diocese on 9 January 1885. The new St. Mark’s Church, built as Howe’s memorial, was consecrated on 21 May 1885, and within two years the old church building had been moved over to the school and turned into classrooms below and dormitories for twenty-five boys above. Documented By June 1887 the school had twenty pupils: “Of these five, perhaps seven, will … enter college. Two are looking to the sacred ministry. The rest are preparing for business life.” Documented Military drill came in the 1890s, and by 1920 the school had a chapel, a gymnasium, a dining hall, a clubhouse, a farm with a dairy, and a motto, Fides et Honor. Documented

Frances Glidden Howe died in May 1904. At her funeral the cadets kept an all-night vigil by her coffin in the school chapel, escorted her with draped colors, and ended with taps. Documented She and her husband lie in the crypt beneath St. James Memorial Chapel, built in 1902 and listed in the National Register in 2001, with the first four bishops of the diocese. Documented

Lima becomes Howe

By 1909 the school was the biggest thing in town, and its mail kept going astray. Lima, Indiana, was forever being confused with the much bigger Lima, Ohio. In January the papers reported “agitation … over the suggestion that the name of the town of Lima be changed to Howe in honor of the school of that name.” By March, “a red hot contest” had been going on for months, and the inspector sent by Postmaster General Meyer recommended the change. Documented

Then, in early April, Senator Beveridge “declined to approve the application,” governed “largely by the advice of the influential business men of the town.” Documented Somebody changed his mind, or went around him: the Lima post office became Howe on 23 June 1909. Documented Later histories say simply that the town was renamed “in honor of” John B. Howe. In 1909 the people who wanted the change said they were naming it after the school. New finding

After the cadets

Howe Military School taught for 135 years. In 2016 the Episcopal diocese ended its long relationship with the school, and on 18 March 2019 the school announced it would close at the end of the school year, citing “operational and fiscal challenges.” In June 2020 the campus was sold to a New York-based religious organization. Documented The grounds are private; the National Register marker for the mansion can be seen from Union Street. Documented

Story or record?

1. “Measures … identical with those afterward adhered to by the majority of justices in the Dred Scott decision” (1920). The 1882 history says “minority,” and the debates and the roll call bear it out. Corrected.
2. “Opened with four boys” or “with two boys.” Two schoolboys and two divinity students, on 2 September 1884. Settled.
3. “Renamed in honor of John B. Howe.” In 1909 the change was argued for in honor of the school, which was named for him.
4. “Married Miss Frances Gidden.” Her name was Glidden: she was the daughter of Gen. Glidden of Claremont, New Hampshire, where Howe’s father was rector. Corrected.
5. “Died on the 20th.” So the wire stories of February 1883. The diocese, the atlas of 1893 and the later histories say 22 January. We follow the diocese.
6. “Born in Boston.” The family genealogy of 1857 says Dorchester, then a separate town and now part of Boston.
7. “Twenty thousand dollars for the survey, 3 March 1835.” The statute books show ten thousand dollars on 30 June 1834 and nothing for this road on 3 March 1835. Open
8. The new St. Mark’s cost “$18,000.” The diocese’s trustees put it at “some $6,000” in 1886. Open
9. The mansion cost $40,000, or $25,000, or $22,000. All three figures are in print. Open
10. Military training began in 1890, or in 1895. Both are in print. Open

The year by year

• 1813 Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, 3 March.
• 19 years later
• 1832 Graduates from Trinity College at nineteen; goes west.
• 1833 Arrives at Lima; teaches the county’s first school.
• 1834 Admitted to the bar on his second try.
• 1836 Lays out Auburn with Wesley Park.
• 1840 Elected to the legislature.
• 1846 Marries Frances Glidden.
• 1850 “A Constitution is made for the benefit of the minority,” 18 November.
• 1851 Votes against barring Black people from Indiana, 23 January.
• 1854 Founds the La Grange Bank with Samuel P. Williams.
• 21 years later
• 1875 Begins the mansion.
• 1878 His first books on money.
• 1883 Dies at Lima, 22 January.
• 1884 Howe Grammar School opens in his old homestead, 2 September.
• 18 years later
• 1902 St. James Memorial Chapel is built.
• 1904 Frances Howe dies; the cadets sound taps.
• 1909 Lima’s post office becomes Howe, 23 June.
• 86 years later
• 1995 The mansion is listed in the National Register.
• 24 years later
• 2019 The school closes after 135 years.

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “Who was John B. Howe?,” Project Scroll, first published 27 October 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/john-b-howe/. To cite a single finding, use its own link on our Discoveries page. Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.