The little city and the happy hit

In 1850 men began cutting planks for the Piqua road south of Fort Wayne. The road was to be planked its whole length and a line of stages put on it, and a sawmill went up beside it to cut the lumber. The land around the mill belonged to Louis Lopshire.

He did not wait. "Louis Lopshire, the proprietor of the land upon which the village was laid out, was not slow to improve the opportunity of founding a town," L. H. Newton wrote in 1880. "He found a ready sale for all the lots offered to purchasers, and in April, 1851, the little city was duly platted and placed upon the records of Allen County, under the title of Middletown."

The plank road was finished and the stages came through full. William Moody opened a grocery. Benoni McLain opened a dry-goods store. Blacksmiths and wagon-makers followed, and, Newton wrote, "the price of town-lots rose in proportion."

That is nearly all anyone wrote about Lopshire. Newton gave him one sentence. The next county history copied it. No other record held names him, and two later books say something else: that Eli Harrod bought forty acres on the Piqua road about 1844 and laid them out in town lots, and that Harrod founded Middletown. Both of those passages belong to accounts of the Harrod family. Newton is the earlier writer. Neither side cites a plat, and the plat book in the Recorder's office has not been read.

The lots themselves are easier to find. In December 1853 the Fort Wayne Sentinel carried a court-ordered sale of "Lots 9 and 21 in the town of Middletown, in said county", part of the estate of John Maston, who had died. In August 1856 the sheriff, R. McMullen, advertised everything Joseph Keffer held "in, and to Lots numbered four and twenty-six in the town of Middletown". He would sell the rents and profits at the Court House door on 30 August, to satisfy judgments in favor of Orff & Recker.

The road was in trouble by then too. In April 1856 the directors of the Fort Wayne and Piqua Plank Road Company met and resolved to sell as much of the road as it took to pay the company's debts.

Newton put the end at about 1857. "The Fort Wayne, Richmond & Cincinnati Railway was to be constructed, and Middletown was not to be a point on the route." The merchants "took the alarm, and removed their goods to other localities; the stage line lost its customary quota of passengers". In 1917 B. J. Griswold gave the town seven good years before the news came of "the new railroad to be built from Fort Wayne down to Richmond and Cincinnati." Another history, in 1889, said only that the railroad "came and passed by Middletown".

None of the three says when the line was built or where it ran instead. The Sentinel of the 1850s, which reported every step of the railroad east to Ohio, never mentions a Fort Wayne, Richmond & Cincinnati at all. Griswold, writing of another township, let a name slip: one village was said to have done to its neighbour "what Hoagland did to Middletown."

On the other side of the county, in Monroe Township, the same year produced a second town.

John Barnhart's family had settled near the middle of the township in 1841. His house was where the first Methodists met in 1847. In 1851 he laid out a town there and called it Monroeville. Newton wrote that Barnhart "made what may be termed 'a happy hit' when he founded a town so near the center of the township."

The railroad came through it. Monroeville sat on the line from Fort Wayne into Ohio that became the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago. In December 1855 the sheriff was selling the rents of "Lots numbered twenty-three (23) and thirty-six (36), in the town of Monroeville". In October 1858 the Sentinel reported two gravel trains in collision on the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago "between Maples and Monroeville". The first report was seven killed and forty wounded. The paper checked, and found three hurt, the worst with a sprained wrist.

Newton did not describe a boom. For a number of years, he wrote, Monroeville "was only a mail station" on the railway, and then it "seems to have awakened very suddenly". It was incorporated as a town in July 1866. The later books add a brother, Jacob, as co-founder, and one gives the month as December. The Sentinel never names a Barnhart in connection with the town.

John Burger had laid out East Liberty in the same township in 1848. By 1880 Newton could say of it that "it was remote from the railroad, and could not long hold out against its rival, Monroeville."

Of Middletown, platted in the same year as Barnhart's town, he wrote: "It is now a quiet hamlet, without even a hotel or store."