Place:Fountain, Indiana, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Fountain County lies in the western part of the U.S. state of Indiana on the east side of the Wabash River. The county was officially established in 1826 and was the 53rd in Indiana. The county seat is Covington.

According to the 2000 census, its population was 17,954; the 2010 population was 17,240. The county has eight incorporated towns with a total population of about 9,700, as well as many small unincorporated communities; it is also divided into eleven townships which provide local services. An interstate highway, two U.S. Routes and five Indiana state roads cross the county, as does a major railroad line.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The state of Indiana was established in 1816. The first non-indigenous settler in the area that became Fountain County is thought to have been a Mr. Forbes, who arrived here in early 1823 and was soon followed by others. Fountain County was officially created on December 30, 1825, the act taking effect on April 1, 1826; the boundaries of the county have not changed since that time. It was named for Major James Fontaine of Kentucky who was killed at Harmar's Defeat (near modern Fort Wayne, Indiana) on October 22, 1790, during the Northwest Indian War.

The first Fountain County courthouse was a two-story frame building constructed in Covington in 1827; Abraham Griffith submitted the winning bid of $335. Two years later in 1829 it was decided that a brick building was needed, and plans were made for a new courthouse; but then an act of the legislature called for the county seat to be moved. In the end it was decided that the county seat should remain in Covington, and the brick courthouse was completed in 1833. A third courthouse was commissioned in 1856, and was completed in 1857 at a cost of $33,500. The circuit court met for the first time in the new building in January 1860, and the building was largely destroyed by fire the same day. Isaac Hodgson was the architect for the rebuilt courthouse, which was first occupied in January 1861; the total cost, including the reconstruction, totaled $54,624.05. The current courthouse was built in 1936–37 at a cost of $246,734; it replaced the previous building which had been declared unsafe. It was constructed by the Jacobson Brothers of Chicago; the architects were Louis R. Johnson and Walter Scholar of Lafayette. The courthouse walls display many murals painted by Eugene Francis Savage and others from 1937 to 1940; the murals cover over of wall space and depict the settlement of western Indiana.

Construction on the Wabash and Erie Canal began in 1832 and worked southwest; it reached Lafayette by 1842. In 1846 it reached Covington, and by 1847 traffic had begun to flow through the county via the canal. Although the coming of the county's first railroad a decade later heralded the end of the canal's usefulness, it wasn't until 1875 that the last canal boat passed through Covington.

The first railroad through the county was the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway (later the Wabash Railroad) which was built from the east across the northern part of the county and reached Attica in 1856; it continued west through Warren County and reached the Illinois state line the following year. Another line, the Indianapolis, Crawfordsville and Danville Railroad (later the Indiana, Bloomington and Western Railway), was started in 1855, but the general state of the economy halted construction in 1858. It was completed by another owner in 1870, and trains began operating on it in 1871; locally, it ran through Covington, Veedersburg and Hillsboro.

Timeline

Population History

source: Source:Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990

Research Tips

The US Genweb page for Fountain County, Indiana includes Biographies, Births, Census, Cemeteries, Deaths, Deeds, Directories, History, Military, Obituaries, and Photos. Some areas have extensive materials; others have transcriptions of just a few families.

External links

www.tctc.com/~emoyhbo