The story
Welcome to Leesburg
Leesburg was laid out by Levi Lee in 1835 on timbered land between the Big and Little Turkey Creek prairies. The county’s first elections and courts met there in 1836, and though the seat went to Warsaw, Leesburg kept its place as the oldest town in the county.
Plain Township was one of the first parts of Kosciusko County to be settled. Elijah Harlan, of Quaker stock, built a squatter’s cabin about a mile north of the future village and moved into it on March 6, 1833, and John Rumley and others had cabins on the prairie the year before. W. B. and I. R. Bain opened the first store for white settlers in the northern part of the prairie in the fall of 1834, later moving it to a lot leased from Levi Lee, and that store was the center of the settlement that became Leesburg.
Lee laid out the village in August 1835 on section 8, on land, Royse wrote, that “lay, beautifully located, between Big Turkey Creek and Little Turkey Creek prairies.” His cabin was the first house on the site, and his plat ran to forty-eight lots. The only lot sold at the first sale went to a Dr. Sellick of La Gro, who did not complete the purchase; Metcalf Beck later took it and built a store. John R. Blaine, said to be a cousin of the statesman James G. Blaine, moved his family’s store to the new village and kept it there for twenty years.
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The act creating the county made Leesburg its temporary seat of justice, and the first election was held there on April 4, 1836, when the poll books showed 219 voters. The commissioners’ court opened at Lee’s cabin on June 29, 1836, and the first circuit court met at his home on October 31, both adjourning to the log schoolhouse for their afternoon sessions. When the court adjourned to meet in Warsaw in November 1837, Royse wrote, it cast “a shadow upon the bright prospects of Leesburg.” A plank road from Leesburg to Cincinnati by way of Oswego and Fort Wayne was projected but not built.
The Methodists organized at the house of Charles Erwin in the 1830s and built a frame church in 1838. Leesburg Lodge No. 181 of the Masons was organized in 1855, and the town was incorporated on June 26, 1876, with W. J. Crawford as president of the first board. The Big Four railroad made Leesburg a station, a fire company was formed in 1879, and a two-story brick school costing $5,000 was finished in 1886. Prohibition papers were printed here in the 1880s, the Peoples Bank opened in January 1903, and a flouring mill went up near the Big Four depot in 1899.
In the early 1880s Eli Summy and other Leesburg men built the first clubhouse for summer sport on the south shore of Tippecanoe Lake, the start of its resorts. The 100 block of Van Buren Street is the Leesburg Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1993. The 2020 census counted 555 people in Leesburg.