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THE TOWN FOUNDED, UNFOUNDED, AND REFOUNDED BY ADDITIONS
The founding record has two acts, and the second is the one the town stands on: Howard quotes the first act whole. "The original plat of Osceola … was laid out in 1837. The record is as follows": a plat on "the west part of the southwest part of section nine, in township number thirty-seven north, range four east," its beginning corner "on the river, between sections eight and nine," its lots "each sixty-six feet front, and one hundred and thirty-two feet back," its alleys fourteen feet wide, signed "JOHN A. HENRICKS. November 17, 1837" (Howard, pp. 309–310). Both county histories spell the proprietor Henricks — Dr. John A. Henricks of South Bend, its second physician, of whom Chapman's full biography (pp. 502–503) never mentions Osceola at all; the town's page and the modern references spell him Hendricks, and the division prints as it stands. The plat was a mill town drawn on paper: its main street came in from the west as "Vistula street" and went out east as the "Road to Toledo," and it showed "an elaborate system of mill races, triple in form, connecting the river on the north, with the Babaugo creek, on the east" (p. 310). Of the name Howard writes the sentence the town's history also carries, in his own flat form: "The town received its musical name from Osceola, the famous Seminole chief, who was taken prisoner by General Jessup in October, 1837, a few weeks before the town was platted" (p. 310). The chief had been seized under a flag of truce on 21 October 1837, four weeks before the signing; the town's published history adds its cautions — that the name's exact source is "shrouded in mystery," that Hendricks "never revealed it for the record," that he "probably" chose it for the chief's prominence in the newspapers reaching the settlements, and that the claim he was a personal friend of Jessup's is "very doubtful," since slow news makes it unlikely he even knew the chief was a prisoner when he christened the town. Both strengths print: Howard's certainty of derivation, the town history's uncertainty of motive; Baker's place-names study sides with the derivation in one line — "The name is for the famous Seminole chief." Osceola of Florida died at Fort Moultrie on 31 January 1838, ten weeks after the signing.
Then the founding was undone: "This plat was vacated by an act of the legislature, approved January 31, 1842" (Howard, p. 310, citing the Local Laws of 1841, p. 166) — a fact the town's published history does not mention. The town that exists grew elsewhere: "An addition to Osceola, by William C. Thrall, was platted April 24, 1856," south of the original site, on the east half of the northwest quarter of section 16, surveyed by Milton W. Stokes, who also surveyed another addition on 4 June 1859. Howard gives the reason in one sentence, and it is the railroad's: "The town grew in its additions, rather than in the original plat … due to the building of the Lake Shore road further from the river than the original plat, through section sixteen instead of section nine. The main Elkhart-Toledo public highway runs through the former site of the original plat, while the Goshen highway passes through the additions" (p. 310). The town on the map today is therefore the child of the 1856 and 1859 additions and the rails that drew them — the 1837 plat survives as the town's name, its date, and a street plan under the highway east of the creek.