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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the truth of the new is never on the news
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the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)