The story
Welcome to Lima Township
Lima Township, on the Michigan line in the middle of the county, is where LaGrange County’s settlement began in 1828. It holds Mongoquinong Prairie, the Potawatomi village site that became Lima and then Howe, and the old mill village of Ontario, home of one of the first colleges in northern Indiana.
Lima covers Township 38 North in Range 9 and the west half of Range 10 East, twenty-four sections, with Michigan to the north, Greenfield to the east, Clay and Bloomfield to the south and Van Buren to the west. The Pigeon River, the best water power in the county, runs through it, and Mongoquinong Prairie spreads east of Howe; the 1874 atlas thought it ‘perhaps the wealthiest township in the county’ for its population. Twin Lakes lie a mile and a half west of Howe, and Cedar Lake on the line with Greenfield. The Potawatomi village of Mongoquinong stood where Howe is now, the center of trails from every direction.
The first settlers of the county came here. Benjamin Blair moved from Ohio to southern Michigan in August 1828 and into a cabin a mile west of the present Howe late that year, finding Nathan Fowler and Jason Thurston sharing a one-room log house north of Crooked Creek. William Thrall and Jonathan Gardner came about the same time, and 1829 brought Moses and Ica Rice, Arthur Burrows, John Kromer, Lemuel Fobes, Thomas Gale and many more. The only government land entered in the county in 1831 lay in this township, beginning with William Gardner’s 160 acres in section 24 on March 31.
Read the full story
The county commissioners divided the new county on May 14, 1832, into Lima on the west and Greenfield on the east, and Lima was gradually cut down to its present size as other townships were made. Benjamin Blair was the first assessor. The county seat was fixed at Lima, laid out in October 1834, and stayed until 1844; the first Methodist church in the county was organized at Robert Hamilton’s home near Lima in 1831, and the first log schoolhouse was built near Lima in 1833, by the 1893 chronology. In 1836 Albert Powell started a still, and in 1838 a tannery and wagon works opened in the village.
At Ontario, in the south-east corner, J. C. Kinney and Mr. Hubbard dammed the Pigeon and built a sawmill in the mid-1830s, and Nathan Jenks bought the property and laid out the village in March 1837. Jenks, a convert of Charles G. Finney of Oberlin, organized the LaGrange Collegiate Institute there on February 6, 1837; it opened in October 1839 and lasted until 1879, and more than 2,000 students passed through it. Rufus Patch held the first teachers’ institute in Indiana there in 1846. Jenks dug a long millrace in 1843 and built a four-story gristmill, and L. M. Abbott’s woolen factory followed in 1842; Ontario was the northern end of the plank road from Fort Wayne in 1848–49.
The Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad came through Lima about 1870, and the Goshen–Sturgis line crossed part of the township after 1888. Lima became Howe about 1909. Ford counted 1,177 people in the township in 1920. The 2020 census counted 2,383 people in Lima Township.