I remember maybe 30 years ago flipping through the abstract of my grandparents' farm and truck stop property and seeing the name associated with the road their farmhouse was on was not one with which I was familiar: McCullough Road. Looking at older abstracts, that name was associated with some farms further south-which is no doubt why it got that name.
But that got me wondering, when did Marshall County adopt its road names? Lately, I've been geeking out on a free service that provides historic newspapers on-line. Argos, Bremen, and Culver are on that service-unfortunately Plymouth's papers are not. Many of the early entries reference road names associated with early settlers in that region. A handful are named for geographic conditions or villages to which the roads connected.
The answer to that question-through a lot of word combinations in the search field-was 1954. Surprisingly late. It appears that the county surveyor at that time had been advocating for a numbering or naming system for the county's roads since the mid-1940s, but the $6000 estimate to post signs (there had been no stop signs, let alone road signs) proved cost-prohibitive to the county. Finally, my mid-July 1954 (the article below is from the Bremen Enquirer 22 July 1954), county road crews were installing signs that featured 3" tall black letters, a white field, and black border, all porcelain. This style of sign was also adopted and installed in Bremen later that year, and no doubt throughout the other towns about that time.
I remember these signs, do you? I know they lasted until at least the late 1980s because the one at the corner of Lilac Road and US 6 had gotten knocked by snow plowing and my dad gave me heavy gauge wire and told me to go put the post back up and fix it to the old concrete corner field post. That means they lasted over 35 years. They were replaced with green signs, which have now been recently replaced with blue signs. I thought I had a picture of the old sign on Lilac, but could not find it. The photo at the top is not from Marshall County, but is nearly identical to the old signs. If anyone has a photo of the old signs-please share. I don't believe any of the towns still have these installed. If anyone has an actual sign from Lilac Road-I may be in the market for purchase.
The county surveyor recommended a naming system that, I believe, followed St. Joseph County's which had been adopted earlier with tree and shrub names on north/south roads in alphabetical order east to west. And numbered roads, based on mile increments with designations of A, B, and C for roads closer together than a mile. So, 1st Road and 2nd Road are a mile apart, going north to south, and 1A or 1B would be within that mile block. The historian in me wishes that we had kept many of those old road names, but clearly from emergency response, a system makes sense.
A few road names did survive like Goshen and LaPorte written about previously. Muckshaw was derived, according to early county historian Daniel McDonald, from farmers who hated the muck through which the road ran exclaimed "pssshaw!" Another early road name which continues down from St. Joseph County is Miami Road, whose name is derived from the "old Indian trail" of the Miami Indians leading from the St. Joseph River to the Tippecanoe. King and Queen Roads were supposed to be the leading north/south collector roads, spaced equally to each side of Michigan Road (the center spine of the county) and the county lines to the east and west. If there are other road names not associated with the 1954 system that I am forgetting, please let me know-but for some reason, I am very familiar with our county roads-wink emoji. Above is the 1954 article announcing the installation of the road signs.
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