I Remember...Culver Names  

by John William Houghton
published in the Culver Citizen ca.1974-1974

My roommate, Parker. who proofreads these articles for me. has pointed out that there has been, in the series, a certain oscillation between the general and the partic ular (well, to be honest, he says. that 1 must make up half the columns out of thin air the night before they're due in the mail). If my readers have noticed this same problem (and I suppose they have -- Parker's not too quick on the uptake these days, having hit twenty-one this last summer). I must apologize, offering as an excuse the fact that it has turned out to be harder than I had imagined it would be to write a column of local history a thousand miles away from the locale in question. Bear with me, folks, and things will pick up when I get home in June -- prosperity is just around the corner, as someone once said.

How old will Culver be in 1975? -It's not a partic ularly important question, I suppose, but it comes to mind because of a newspaper clipping (from the Citizen, of course) which I've just found tucked into the back of my copy of McDonald's HISTORY OF MARSHALL COUNTY (alright, Parker, so this is where I get my ideas -- wanna make something of it?). More about the clippings in a minute, but first in this search for beginnings I should talk about the early settlers of Union Township --the first white people to live on the site of Culver .

The settlers came up to old Michigan Road in the early summer of 1836, approaching Culver from the east along (more or less) the modern State Road 10 (in fact, there is a small stone at the corner of Road 10 and the county road just east of Fleet Field which commemorates the arrival of the doughty band). If this event is taken as the beginning, Culver is now 139 years old. But we can hardly let the matter rest at that

The first record I have found of a real village on this site is that newspaper clipping from June, 1969 CITIZEN. It shows a very surprising 1844 map: Lake Maxineukkee (as they spelled it then) is easy to find, and on its northern shore is the hamlet of "Geneva." That would make us 132 years old, but, as I have said, the map is surprising: the first official record of our town is dated 1844 and refers to "Union Town," Bayless L. Dickson, Proprietor. McDonald makes no mention of Geneva, and I still have no idea where the map marker got the name. The 1844 plat, which advertises: "Union Town is laid out in such a manner that it presents to the eye a view of Lake Maxinkuckee, and is surrounded with as good a country as can be, found in northern Indiana," would leave Culver with only 131 years.

At some point in the fifty years after the first plat was filed, the name of the village was changed to Marmont, in honor of a a local citizen. In 1894. the village was incorporated, and so Culver had its legal beginning, eighty-one years ago.

And then in 1896, the name was changed again. Ninety-nine people (ninety-nine men, things being what they were in those days), as a majority of the voters, petitioned the Town Board to replace "Marmont" with "Culver City." The Board, like Barkus, was willing, but the U.S. Post Office was not. It seems that there was already a Culver , Indiana and the addition of "City" to our town's name didn't make any difference.

Henry Harrision Culver , who found himself at the center of the whole affair, went off to the other Culver to see what could be done. He discovered that the town was named for Crane Culver , and, the citizens weren't about to let his name be forgotten. But Henry Harrision was nothing if not imaginative, and soon rose to the situation. He offered to meet all the expenses involved if the other town's name were to be changed to "Crane." The deal went through, the Post Office agreed, and Culver , Indiana, on beautiful Lake Maxinkuckee, had finally begun—79 years ago.

Well. there you have it: 139, 132,131, 81 or 79, Culver can take its pick of ages. But this column is intended to display a prejudice favoring people over institutions, so I must point out, before closing, that our Culver is as old as its oldest citizen and as young as its newest arrival-it has its beginnings not only in all the other Culver s, Marmonts, Union Towns and Genevas there have been, but also on every place in which any of us have ever lived. And that's what makes it interesting. tenn' annkennuvar.