page_title: Fountain County, Indiana
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Fountain County, Indiana / History
caption_attribution_description: Map of w:Fountain County, Indiana, United States
context_page_description: Fountain County lies in the western part of the U.S. state of Indiana on the east side of the Wabash River. The county was officially established in 1826 and was the 53rd in Indiana. The county seat is Covington.
  According to the 2000 United States Census, its population was 17,954; the 2010 population was 17,240. The county has two incorporated cities and six incorporated towns with a total population of about 9,700, as well as many small unincorporated communities. It is divided into eleven townships which provide local services. An interstate highway, two U.S. Routes and five Indiana state roads cross the county, as does a major railroad line.
context_section_description: Indiana was granted statehood near the end of 1816. The first non-indigenous settler in the future Fountain County is thought to have been a Mr. Forbes, who arrived in early 1823 and was soon followed by others. The legislative act creating Fountain County was passed on December 30, 1825, setting an effective date of April 1, 1826. The county's boundaries have remained unchanged since that time. It was named for Major James Fontaine of Kentucky who was killed at Harmar's Defeat (near modern Fort Wayne, Indiana) on October 22, 1790, during the Northwest Indian War.
  The first Fountain County courthouse was a two-story frame building constructed in Covington in 1827; Abraham Griffith submitted the winning bid of $335. In 1829, plans were made for a larger courhouse building, but then an act of the legislature called for the county seat to be moved. In the end it was decided that the county seat should remain in Covington, and the brick courthouse was completed in 1833. A third courthouse was commissioned in 1856, and was completed in 1857 at a cost of $33,500. The circuit court met for the first time in the new building in January 1860, and the building was largely destroyed by fire the same day. Isaac Hodgson was the architect for the rebuilt courthouse, which was first occupied in January 1861; the total cost, including the reconstruction, totaled $54,624.05. The current courthouse was built in 1936–37 at a cost of $246,734; it replaced the previous building which had been declared unsafe. The 1937 building was constructed by the Jacobson Brothers of Chicago; the architects were Louis R. Johnson and Walter Scholar of Lafayette. The courthouse walls display murals painted by Eugene Francis Savage and others from 1937 to 1940, covering 2,500 square feet (232 m²) of wall space and depicting the settlement of western Indiana.
  Digging on the Wabash and Erie Canal began in 1832 and worked southwest; it reached Lafayette by 1842. In 1846 it reached Covington, and by 1847 traffic was moving through the county via the canal. Completion of the county's first railroad line in the 1850s heralded an end to the canal's usefulness, and in 1875 the last canal boat passed through Covington.
  The first railway line through the county was the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway (later the Wabash Railroad) which was built from the east across the northern part of the county and reached Attica in 1856; it continued west through Warren County and reached the Illinois state line the following year. The Indianapolis, Crawfordsville and Danville Railroad (later the Indiana, Bloomington and Western Railway), was started in 1855, but the general state of the economy halted construction in 1858. It was completed by another owner in 1870, and traffic started in 1871. It passed through Covington, Veedersburg and Hillsboro.
caption: Map of Fountain County from an 1876 atlas
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 30D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2012:04:26 21:46:12", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "178", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4838", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6958", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "63/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:04:26 14:15:00", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2012:04:26 14:15:00", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "193557/32768", "EXIF ApertureValue": "174021/32768", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "47", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1521", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2190", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "4714", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "233600/59", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "233600/59", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}