The story
Welcome to LaGrange
LaGrange was laid out in 1836 in thick woods at the very center of the county, and in 1844 it took the courthouse away from Lima. Its red-brick courthouse of 1878–79, with its clock tower over Detroit Street, still anchors a quiet town that has always lived on the farms around it.
The county was named for La Grange, the country home of the Marquis de Lafayette near Paris, when it was organized on April 1, 1832, and the town took the county’s name. The town site, in the south half of section 19 and in section 30 of Township 37 North, Range 10 East, was bought from the government at the Fort Wayne land office in 1835 by George F. Whittaker and Theodore Craft; Joshua T. Hobbs later bought an interest. Reuben J. Dawson, William F. Beavers, Whittaker and James McConnell platted it on June 18, 1836, with a public square, streets 66 feet wide, and a reserved right to turn the creek a quarter mile for mills. Detroit Street became the business street and still is.
The ground was dense forest, thick with underbrush and prickly ash, with a swamp south and east of the square that took years and hundreds of loads of earth to fill. The county had sat at Lima since 1832, but as the southern townships filled up the legislature moved the seat to the center of the county, and the county offices came to LaGrange in 1844. Isaac P. Grannis and Thomas Clark built the first two houses, one of them a boarding house for the men building the courthouse. William Wigton put up the first frame building, a warehouse at Detroit and Spring streets, where C. B. Holmes kept the first store and the first post office; its receipts for the first quarter were $1.08. Ford (1920) says Ans Clark killed seven deer in one day within gunshot of the square that was being cleared.
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The first courthouse here, a two-story frame building, went up in 1843. Herman B. McCoy and William S. Boyd opened a store that year, McCoy and James B. Caldwell started a tannery in 1846, D. Martin built a sawmill in 1844, and Boyd and John Starr a flour mill in 1856–57. The town was incorporated in 1855; its first trustees met on December 26 of that year. Railroads were slow to come. The Michigan Southern went north and south of the county, and products went to market by wagon for twenty years, until the first locomotive of the Grand Rapids & Indiana reached LaGrange from Sturgis on April 11, 1870, ‘welcomed by the roar of cannon, and band music.’
The present courthouse was begun in 1878 to plans by A. J. Smith of Chicago, finished by T. J. Tolan & Son of Fort Wayne, and built by Bosseker & Begue for $46,700. About two thousand people came to see the cornerstone laid on August 15, 1878, and the county offices moved in in November 1879. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. In 1882 the town had seven dry goods stores, six drug stores, three newspapers, twelve lawyers and thirteen doctors, two steam sawmills, a flour mill, a carriage factory and a large cheese factory. Waterworks came in 1893, and in 1919 a Carnegie library, begun by the women’s literary clubs, was dedicated at West Spring and High streets.
The first burial ground was on the site of the old school building; in 1863 the graves were moved to the present town cemetery, Greenwood, south of town. Ford counted 1,772 people in 1910 and called LaGrange ‘a good home town,’ supported by the farms around it. The 2020 census counted 2,715.
