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1823–1880 · twenty years a trustee, one term in the Legislature
The boy whose mother froze to death in the settlement's first winter grew up to hold its offices for a generation. T. J. Garoutte was born in Ohio 19 December 1823, son of James S. and Mary (Babington) Garoutte; the family came to Indiana in 1830 and to this county in 1831, the year of his mother's death on the Rolling Prairie road, told above. He farmed — working at $8 a month to pay for 80 of his 250 acres — kept store in New Carlisle, and held office as a habit: Township Trustee for twenty years, and in 1878 he represented St. Joseph County in the state Legislature. He was treasurer of the Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association from its organization in 1853 or 1854 — "the latter has acted in that capacity ever since," Chapman writes in 1880, though the same article's list of current officers prints his initials as T. G. Garoutte; the variance stands unmerged in the crime leg's file, where the association is told whole. He sat on Olive Township's war-aid committee in April 1861. His grandfather, Chapman adds, "was educated for a Catholic priest" — a line the sketch leaves there, and so does this section.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), T. J. Garoutte sketch, pp. 777–778; Anti-Horse-Thief Association article, pp. 769–770; war chapter, p. 411.