Terre Coupee's founders: Hubbard, Egbert, and the man named Hamilton

1830–1861 · the rival town on the Chicago Road

Before New Carlisle had a rival railroad, it had a rival town, and the rival town had three founders and a namesake nobody named. Samuel Garwood sold a prairie tract about 1836 to Jonathan Hubbard, who laid out Terre Coupee upon it. Hubbard (born about 1787; died 28 February 1861, aged 74, and buried at Hamilton) was the town's proprietor in fact: Howard records that the Terre Coupee plat was surveyed by Thomas P. Bulla for Jacob Egbert and acknowledged 12 April 1837, with additions acknowledged 30 January 1841 by Jacob Egbert and Jonathan Hubbard jointly — and that the plat was vacated by the county commissioners 10 June 1841, a vacation the town outlived in fact if not in law, since its post office, its lodge and its churches ran on for decades. Jacob Egbert (died 17 January 1871, aged 76, at Hamilton) was of the township's first family: his kinsmen Paul and John Egbert hosted the county's first Methodist society in 1830, and an Egbert — John — served as the county agent who carried out the first county-seat bond issue, with Jacob Egbert as one of his bondsmen. The third founder is a surname only: a man named Hamilton built the town's hotel, "and the town took his name" — Hamilton being the name the village itself answered to for a century, in its church, its cemetery and its foundation, long after Terre Coupee's post office and station had carried the older name away to the railroad two miles east. No record reached by this build gives the hotel-keeper Hamilton a first name; he stands in the file as the record leaves him.

Jonathan Hubbard's son R. Hubbard (born 12 March 1816 in Oneida County, New York; came west in 1836) carried the family into the county's government: three terms a county commissioner, owner of 700 acres, paying taxes on $100,000 in 1880. Another son, Lucius Hubbard, who "spent his boyhood in and about the town," became the "Hon. Lucius Hubbard" whose reminiscences Howard prints at length — the township's export to Michigan public life, at the strength Howard gives him.

Sources

1. Howard (1907), vol. 1, Terre Coupee section (plat survey for Jacob Egbert, 1837; additions, 1841; vacation, 10 June 1841; Lucius Hubbard's reminiscences).
2. Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter (Garwood–Hubbard sale; the Hamilton hotel tradition) and the R. Hubbard sketch, p. 779; organization chapter (John Egbert, county agent; Jacob Egbert, bondsman).
3. DAR cemetery inscriptions, Hamilton: Jonathan Hubbard (d. 28 Feb. 1861, aged 74); Jacob Egbert (d. 17 Jan. 1871, aged 76).