The story
Welcome to Howe
Howe is the oldest town in LaGrange County. Laid out in 1834 on the site of the Potawatomi village of Mongoquinong, it was the county seat as Lima until 1844, and was renamed about 1909 for John B. Howe, the lawyer whose bequest founded the Howe school.
Long before the settlers came, the site was a well-known Potawatomi village. The 1882 history says Mongoquinong was approached by deeply worn trails from every direction, that corn hills hoed by its people could still be traced in the north-west part of the village fifty years later, and that an old seedling apple orchard grew in the sand on its west side. By 1828 only about thirty lodges remained, scattered along the Pigeon River. The word Mongoquinong, the 1882 history says, was applied by the Potawatomi to the prairie east of the village, and its meaning is uncertain. The Potawatomi of the county were removed west in the late 1830s.
The first settlers of the county, Benjamin Blair, Nathan Fowler, Jason Thurston, William Thrall and Jonathan Gardner, took up land near the village site in 1828 and 1829. Moses Rice and his son Ica came in 1829 and kept the first trade, and the first term of the circuit court was held at Moses Rice’s house on October 22, 1832. The Rices laid out the village of Mongoquinong in October 1834, with John Kromer as surveyor, giving eighty-four lots, a public square and two acres for a cemetery to the county for the county seat; the legislature changed the name to Lima that year. Samuel P. Williams added a northern plat in April 1836. The first courthouse stood here from 1833.
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Lima grew fast until 1838 and reached about 450 people by 1840. Gale & Williams opened a $25,000 store in 1837, its goods shipped by the Erie Canal, lake vessel and wagon from New York. There were wagon and furniture shops, a glove maker, a tannery of 1838, a foundry of 1845 that made plows and bar iron from bog ore dug in the nearby marshes, and a large distillery. John B. Howe began practicing law here in 1833; old settlers told the 1882 historian he had no equal at the Lima bar. When the county seat went to LaGrange in 1844, Ford wrote, Lima ‘got its everlasting set-back,’ and lived afterward on the farms around it and its schools.
Lima was noted for its schools. Samuel P. Williams built a Young Ladies Seminary in 1852, the public school building of 1874–75 was called the best in the county, and after John B. Howe’s death in 1883 his bequest to the Episcopal Church, increased by his widow Frances, his brother James Blake Howe and others, founded Howe Grammar School under Bishop David Buel Knickerbacker in 1884. It became Howe Military School, the town’s largest enterprise, with St. James Memorial Chapel on its campus. Because freight and mail for Lima, Indiana, kept going astray to Lima, Ohio, the town took the name Howe about 1909. The Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad gave it a station, and about 1910 O. P. McKee’s Star mill on Crooked Creek began lighting the village with electricity.
The military academy closed in 2019 after 135 years, and its campus was sold in 2020. Howe’s John Badlam Howe Mansion, St. James Memorial Chapel, Samuel P. Williams House and the Star Milling and Electric Company district are on the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census counted 610 people in the Howe census-designated place.
