History Dates to 1836  

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

Stories passed down in the families of its earliest settlers declare that the arrival of Culver's founding mothers and fathers in July of 1836 was marked by the sounding of a conch shell, as a signal to those who had acted as harbingers for the main party. At twilight of a hot summer day, on the highlands east of the lake already named Maxinkuckee, the ox-drawn wagons that had plodded north along the Michigan Road from Rush County were finally drawn to a halt, and the British immigrants, driven to this frontier by an international depression,- staked their claim to the land of the Indians, Jesuits, and coureurs du bois by blowing a sea-shell horn.

At least one earlier settlement had been planned for the area, but the first village to meet with any success on the shores, of Lake Maxinkuckee called Union Town when it waylaid out by its proprietor Bayless-Dickson, in 1844; Its setting at the north side of the large glacial lake, within two miles of the camp site of '36, made the village at once pleasant to live in and convenient to the various farming families for whom it served as a trading center.

The village grew, and (after passing from the Dicksons to their cousins the Houghtons) eventually left proprietary status altogether; in 1851, the name of the development was changed to Marmont, to honor a Marshal of France who had deserted Napoleon to support the Bourbons.

During that time, the lake Began to attract to the area its second major constituency, the vacationers. At first, these were merely residents of Plymouth, the county seat, who had benefitted sufficiently from the county's growth to be able to afford a summer home miles away on the high eastern banks of the Indians, "lake of sparkling water.'' As transportation became easier with the completion of the Vandalia Railroad in 1883, the summer settlements increased. As hotels were opened, the first commercially successful steamboats appeared on the lake. This pleasant farming town with its collection of outlying summer colonies spread out on the west, north and east shores of the take. It had particular appeal to one St. Louis businessman who, while traveling as a stove salesman early in his life, had married a farmer's daughter from the east side of Maxinkuckee. So when Henry Harrison Culver's poor health required him to quit active management of the Wrought Iron Range Company, he returned to the area where his wife, Emily Jane Hand, had grown up and begun to devote himself to charitable projects. His efforts to begin a county fairground were unsuccessful, and when the Chatauqua movement did catch on in the area, it was years later, and on the other side of the lake from the property on which Mr. Culver had introduced the idea.

Finally, Mr. Culver decided to turn his hand to education, and he founded the Culver Military Institute (later Academy) in July of 1894. Within a year, the school burned to the ground, but Mr. Culver rebuilt it with fireproof brick, steel and stone. It was at this point that he remarked about the lake that had so attracted him, "While fishing one day I caught a fine seven-pound bass, and sir, that bass has cost me $250,000."

His determined philanthropy won the admiration of the town's residents and, in 1895, at the petition of 100 voters, Marmont changed its name to Culver City (Mr. Culver smoothed the way by arranging for an earlier Culver, Indiana, to change its name to Crane; later, the Post Office asked that "city" be dropped, and the town has been simply Culver ever since).

By the time of Mr. Culver's death in 1897, his school, which had combined with (Confederate) Colonel A. F. Fleet's fire-ravaged Missouri Military Academy, was on a steady course that has since led it to become, as The Culver Educational Foundation, one of the nation's premiere preparatory schools.

In the 86 years since Henry Harrison Culver's death, the town that named itself after him has changed in many outward appearances. The tourist industry reached some sort of peak in tens and twenties, when the railroad ran six trains a day to Maxinkuckee In the season, and writers of the "Hoosier Renaissance" summered in the area. Improved transportation since then has meant that the lake population has returned to its original nature as a summer colony.

The Town Park on the north shore of the lake is still one of the best swimming sites on the Iake and the crowds there in the summer show that the idea of an afternoon at Maxinkuckee has, with its clear spring water and tree-lined shores, power to attract people even today. Various small industries of the past have been lost through time -- the refrigerator, for example, has more or less obviated the former ice-harvesting industry -- but new ones have been gained, particularly a branch of the McGill Corporation, manufacturing bearings in an Industrial park on the west side of town.

The various trades and businesses, which were the town's original reason for being, can still be found along Main Street, though they have reached northward since those days and now line Lake Shore Drive and State Road 10.

East of Lake Shore Drive is the vast campus of the Educational Foundation; near Fleet Field, its private airport, where student pilots' take-off and landing patterns bring low flying planes over the ancient council sites of the Potawattomi Indians, there still stands a stone marking the place where the weary families of 1836 camped and blew their conch-shell horn.