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The Man Who Built Ligonier

The Life of Elias Baron Gerber (1831–1915)

From Stark County to the Prairie

"Go west, young man, go west and grow up with the country." —John Babsone Lane Soule

The Gerbers were a large family and a restless one. David and Susanna Buechtel Gerber raised twelve children on their farm in Stark County, Ohio, and if the land was good enough for most people, David was not most people. In 1855, he packed up the household and moved the whole operation to Eden Township, La Grange County, Indiana, settling on new ground in a country that was still being carved out of the woods. E.B. was twenty-four that year, old enough to have his own ideas about where a man might make himself useful.

He had already picked up more skills than most men twice his age. He could build a house, survey a property line, and stand in front of a classroom full of farm children and teach them their letters. He had learned carpentry, civil engineering, and school teaching back in Ohio, and he carried all three trades west with him like tools in a kit, ready for whatever the frontier needed next.

What the frontier needed next, as it turned out, was a city.

The Man Who Platted Omaha

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." —Eleanor Roosevelt

E.B. did not stay long in Indiana that first year. He kept going west, all the way to Nebraska Territory, where speculators and surveyors were staking out town sites along the Missouri River. He brought his knowledge of engineering to bear on the most ambitious project he would ever touch: laying out the streets and lots of Omaha City. The town was little more than a promise and a set of stakes in the prairie mud, but E.B. helped draw the lines that would become a city of a quarter million souls. He was twenty-four years old, standing on a bluff above the Missouri with a transit and a chain, measuring the future.

After about eight months, having seen what he needed to see of the western territories, he came home. Nebraska could grow on its own. Indiana still needed building.

Surveyor, Teacher, Builder

"The buildings and the institutions of man are but the framework for his own development. It is the spiritual vision and the moral strength of individual men that carry civilization forward." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back in Noble County, E.B. settled into Ligonier and got to work. He taught school at Eden Chapel on the Hawpatch and later in the first schoolhouse in Ligonier itself — the old red schoolhouse, as it came to be remembered. He took up his carpenter's tools and began building. One of his early projects was the first Methodist Episcopal Church in Ligonier, a structure that became part of the permanent edifice and stood as a kind of signature: E.B. Gerber was here, and he built things that lasted.

In 1857, he was appointed Deputy County Surveyor of Noble County under William Dowling. The following year, the voters elected him County Surveyor in his own right, and he held that office until 1865 — a full decade of measuring, mapping, and knowing every section line, creek bed, and property corner in the county. From 1864 to 1867, he published maps of Noble and the adjoining counties, the kind of careful, detailed work that towns depended on as they grew from clusters of cabins into places with streets and deeds and courthouses.

In October 1857, he married Mary Moses of Perry Township. They would have six children, four of whom — O.F., Delta, Minnie, and Dwight — survived to carry the family forward.

The Hardware Man

"Commerce is the engine of civilization. Every honest transaction binds human beings together more firmly." —Thomas Carlyle

By the late 1860s, E.B. had turned his attention to commerce. In January 1869, he purchased the interest of Mr. Wadsworth in the firm of Wadsworth & Parker Hardware, and a year later bought out Parker as well, making himself sole proprietor of the whole establishment. The store carried a full line of hardware, stoves, tinware, and agricultural implements — everything a farmer, a builder, or a housewife in Noble County could need under one roof.

This was not a small-town hobby. In a place like Ligonier in the 1870s, the hardware store was the beating heart of the local economy. Every nail driven into a new barn, every plow blade that turned the spring soil, every stove that kept a family warm through an Indiana winter — all of it passed through E.B. Gerber's hands. He ran the business the way he did everything else: progressively, thoroughly, and with an eye toward what the town would need next.

In 1871, he joined with Treash and Kirchbaum to establish a foundry in Ligonier, which by 1880 had been converted into a carriage manufactory. In 1874, he and Carlton Jones started a handle factory. E.B. was not content to sell other men's goods; he wanted to make things, to put Ligonier's name on products that went out into the world.

A Brother at Andersonville

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." —Aristotle

Not all of the Gerber story is one of building and progress. In 1861, E.B.'s younger brother Jacob enlisted in Company C of the Thirtieth Indiana Volunteer Infantry to fight for the Union. Jacob served until the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, where the Confederate forces shattered the Union right and swept up thousands of prisoners. Jacob was among them.

He was taken to Andersonville, the Confederate prison camp in Georgia that would become synonymous with suffering and death. Nearly thirteen thousand Union soldiers died there of disease, starvation, and exposure. Jacob J. Gerber was one of them. He died on September 3, 1864, at the age of twenty-four.

The war touched the family again in a different way. Benjamin, the youngest of the eleven Gerber children, had become a tinsmith and ran the tin department in E.B.'s hardware store. On June 5, 1881, Benjamin and his wife — née Maxwell, married only three years — drowned in the reservoir at Rome City. The details are lost, but the fact remains: E.B. buried a brother who died in a prison camp and another who died in a lake, and he kept building.

Statesman and Citizen

"The duty of the statesman is to establish public happiness as the foundation of public security." —Thomas Jefferson

E.B. Gerber served in nearly every civic office Ligonier had to offer, and then some. He was elected Trustee of Eden Township in La Grange County as early as 1856, when he was barely twenty-five. He served as the first Assessor of Ligonier after its incorporation. He sat on the City Council for several terms, served as City Clerk, rose to President of the Council, and put in years as a School Trustee on the board that gave Ligonier its high school and its first high school building.

Twice he went to Indianapolis. In the fall of 1882, the voters of Elkhart, Noble, and DeKalb counties sent him to the Indiana General Assembly, and they sent him again in 1901. He was by then an old man by the standards of the day, but he had lost none of his appetite for improvement. He became an early advocate for good roads — a cause that mattered deeply in a state where mud could swallow a wagon to its axles for half the year — and he authored the first bill in the state of Indiana providing for voting machines. It is a small, quiet legacy, the kind of thing that most people never think about when they walk into a polling place, but E.B. thought about it, and he wrote the law.

He was a Universalist in his faith and a Mason by fraternal conviction — a Knight Templar and many times the Worshipful Master of Ligonier Lodge No. 185, F. & A.M. He belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Apollo Commandery No. 19, K.T., of Kendallville. It was said that attending lodge meetings was one of his particular pleasures, which is the sort of thing said about a man who genuinely enjoyed the company of his neighbors.

The Gerber-King Connection

"In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future, and bonds to one another." —Alex Haley

Among the twelve Gerber children, E.B.'s sister Christiana — known to the family as Tena — married Isaac William King of the 88th Indiana Infantry, the Civil War veteran whose story is told elsewhere on this site. Through that marriage, the Gerber line runs directly into the King family and, by extension, into the McConnell and Stratton families that make up so much of this genealogy. The Ohio-to-Indiana migration that brought the Gerbers west in 1855 was part of the same great movement that carried the Kings and McConnells into Noble County, where their children and grandchildren would intermarry and put down roots that hold to this day.

A Gentle Disposition

"A good man leaves a lasting legacy in the hearts of those who knew him." —Anonymous

E.B. Gerber died on Tuesday afternoon, April 6, 1915, at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Henry Green, on Main Street in Ligonier. He was eighty-four years old. The cause was sepsis from a gangrenous ulcer on his left foot — a slow, stubborn decline for a man who had spent his life in motion. He had been weakening for weeks, and when the end came at half past four in the afternoon, it came quietly, as most things did with E.B.

His obituary called him a man prominent in Ligonier affairs for over fifty years, and that was true as far as it went, but it did not go far enough. He had helped plat a city on the Nebraska prairie. He had surveyed and mapped a county. He had built a church, run a hardware store that supplied half the farms in the township, started a foundry, a carriage works, and a handle factory. He had served in the state legislature and written a law. He had buried two brothers before their time and raised four children to adulthood. He had taught school in the old red schoolhouse and presided over the Masonic lodge and advocated for good roads and voting machines at a time when both were novel ideas.

He left behind the surviving members of his large family. His surviving siblings included Mrs. Elisa Schrock of Middlebury, Mrs. S. F. Yoder of Topeka, Mrs. Sarah Bruner, Mrs. Isaac King, and Mrs. Christian Gerber of Ligonier.

His obituary noted one more thing, and it is perhaps the truest thing that can be said about a man who spent fifty years at the center of a small town's life: his gentle disposition endeared him to all who knew him, and he left many friends.

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Elias Baron Gerber (1831–1915) was the son of David and Susanna Buechtel Gerber of Stark County, Ohio. He is buried in Ligonier, Noble County, Indiana. His sister Christiana married Isaac King, making E.B. the great-great-uncle of the author. Primary sources for this story include the biographical sketch published in Counties of Whitley and Noble, Indiana: Historical and Biographical and E.B.'s obituary from April 1915.