This will be a short post, because I am only writing it to inform my readers of a post in a different blog. Steve Shook’s excellent blog, Porter County’s Past: An Amateur Historian’s Perspective, features an article this week, titled “Fact or Folklore? The Naming of Valparaiso.” In this post he addresses a popular myth about how the Porter County seat got its name, and gives a well-documented explanation of the true story.
In the course of the discussion he mentions the Lewis Publishing Company, publisher of the 1912 History of Porter County, Indiana: A Narrative of its Historical Progress, its People and its Principal Interests. It turns out that the Lewis Publishing Company has a peripheral connection to Our Casbon Journey. The company was founded in Chicago by Benjamin Franklin Lewis and his brother Samuel Thompson Lewis. Their father was a physician named L’Mander Lewis, who settled in Porter County in 1849.[1]
It turns out that L’Mander Lewis is my third great grandfather! His granddaughter, Florence Lewis, was the mother in law of my grandfather, Leslie Christy Casbon.