History
Organized in 1844, the area was first named Richardville County in honor of the Miami chief Jean Baptiste Richardville who signed early treaties with the United States government. His Miami name was Pe-che-wa, meaning Wildcat. The Wildcat Creek watershed includes most of present-day Howard and Clinton counties, and the creek was named for him. The county was later renamed after a European-American settler.
Another chief of the Miami, She-Moc-E-Nish, was granted the Anthony Wayne Flag, also known as the Greenville Treaty Flag. It was passed down to French-Indian descendants in the Aveline family. They eventually intermarried with one of the earliest Honey Creek Township European-American families. The Evans family is linked to both the Thomases and the Brubakers, all of whom have lands within the Wildcat Creek watershed dating back to the times of the earliest European-American settlements. A history of this flag can be seen at the Indiana Historical Bureau
As stated on the Honey Creek Township entry, "Honey Creek was organized in 1841 as a township in the northeastern corner of neighboring Clinton County. The township's early population tended to be politically Republican, so the Republican party in Howard County and the Democrats in Clinton County collaborated to have Honey Creek Township removed from Clinton and added in 1850 to Howard."
Russiaville became a Quaker settlement in the years before the Civil War. They created a stop on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves in the antebellum years in nearby New London, then the site of the Friends Meeting serving the entire area. A local legend tells that the stop included a tunnel under New London from a safe house to a cave in the hollow of Honey Creek, near the location of the Friends Meetinghouse.
Russiaville is the birthplace of Jonathan Dixon Maxwell (Sept. 3, 1864), builder of the Maxwell automobile. He is buried there.
Almost all of the town was destroyed on April 11, 1965, by an F4 tornado, which was part of the Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak. With rebuilding, the town had a population of 1,094 at the 2010 census.
Read more about this topic: Russiaville, Indiana
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—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)