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1830–1880 · Olive Township's name
Olive Township is named for a settler's wife, and in 1880 she was still there to be asked. Charles Vail settled in the township in 1830 and was afterward elected a county judge. His wife was Olive (Stanton) Vail. Howard preserves Judge Egbert's account of the naming — a supper-table anecdote of 1831, told in the Religion section's file — and Chapman records the plain fact that "she still living in New Carlisle in 1880," half a century after the township took her Christian name. The record gives the township one more Vail item, and it is a disagreement: Chapman corrects the county atlas in terms — "The first couple married in this township, according to the Atlas of the county, were Charles Vail and Olive Stanton, but this is not correct" — and then, in the pages read, never names the couple he says was first. The atlas's claim and Chapman's flat contradiction both print; the identity of the first-married couple stands as a named gap, settled by the county's marriage record from 1830, which no pass of this build has yet read.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, p. 765 (the naming; the first-marriage correction, verbatim).
- Howard (1907), vol. 1, Olive Township section (the naming anecdote; told in the Religion section's file).