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A PLAT IN SEARCH OF A TOWN
The plat did not make a town quickly — in Howard's word, its growth was "feeble": the original plat was vacated in 1842, the additions that replaced it waited for the railroad in 1856 and 1859, and the federal count of 1880 found 129 people in Osceola — a village of some two dozen households at a creek mouth, forty-three years after its founding plat. Its institutions came at township pace: a post office, in operation at Osceola since 1854 by the postal record (neither county history states the date, and the note carries it at postal-history strength); the township's first school-house had stood since 1832 and its first church organization, the First Baptist Church of Penn Township, since February 1837 — the Schools and Religion sections carry them at their own strength. Howard prints the village's turn-of-the-century state in two facts: its population in 1900 was 177, and its growth quickened only when the interurban was built — the South Bend–Goshen line of the Indiana Railway Company, built 1899–1900, which "built a power house at Osceola" (pp. 310–311). The village that entered the twentieth century was thus still smaller than many a township neighborhood; what changed it, twice over, was carriage from outside — first the steam railroad through its additions, then the electric line with its power house. The next two beats take those carriers in order.