The story
Welcome to Angola
Angola was laid out in 1838 by Thomas Gale and Cornelius Gilmore, who won the county seat for their wilderness town by promising to put up the county buildings themselves. The railroad of 1870 made it the busiest place in Steuben County, and in 1884 it became the home of the Tri-State Normal College.
Thomas Gale and Cornelius Gilmore came in April 1836 and entered the land on which Angola stands; Gilmore built a rude shanty and, that fall, the first house, which for a short time took in travelers. In August 1836 Daniel and David Phenicie cut a road down from near Brockville, now Fremont, meeting Gilmore and John Whelan, who had cut their way north to meet them, and the next day Daniel Phenicie drove the first team into Angola. The 1920 county history says it is generally believed the town was named for Angola, New York, the part of the country the proprietors came from.
When Steuben County was organized in 1837, the owners of Steubenville, a few miles south near the present Pleasant Lake, offered $16,200 to have the county seat there. Gale and Gilmore offered instead to give the site for a court-house and public square and to put up the buildings themselves, and their offer was accepted. The first session of the circuit court met at Gilmore’s house and adjourned to Gale’s. Erastus Farnham and Aaron B. Goodwin surveyed the town on April 5, 1838, and the frame court-house was finished in 1841 at a cost of $2,000.
Read the full story
Dr. James McConnell became the first postmaster in 1838, as well as the first physician and the county’s first recorder. Gale kept the first store, in a tamarack log house on the east side of the public square, and Darius Orton put up the first frame building, a hotel at Maumee and Elizabeth streets, where a select school was taught in 1839. Robert L. Douglas, Daniel E. Palmer and E. R. May, the first lawyers, all came in 1838.
Angola was incorporated as a town on October 1, 1866, and as a city in 1906. The present court-house was built in 1868 for $27,000, and the old frame one was moved to Maumee Street. In 1870 the Fort Wayne, Jackson & Saginaw Railroad was finished through the county, and that year alone improvements worth $96,475 were made in Angola, among them James Jackson’s brick block. A stone and brick jail followed in 1877. The 1885 history called Angola the only town of any size in the county, ‘with no rivals within a day’s wagon ride.’
The Tri-State Normal College opened in June 1884 on six acres bought by a local association, and L. M. Sniff became its president in March 1885. It was incorporated as Tri-State College in 1906, with normal, pharmacy and engineering departments, and was renamed Trine University in 2008. A Carnegie library was dedicated in November 1915, and in 1917 the county raised the granite Soldiers’ Monument, about fifty feet high and crowned by a bronze figure of Peace, in the middle of the public square. The 2020 census counted 9,340 people in Angola.
