James Townsend laid out Putnamville in 1830 on land he had purchased from the original owner, Edward Heath, and received the rights of "running any water pipes underground to any part of the town," perhaps the first hint of a water works system in Indiana. Through the work of Townsend, Daniel W. Layman, and Archibald Cooper, the town soon became a thriving community and the major stagecoach connection in the county. It grew to about 50 buildings, including Bowen's general stores, the National Hotel, Whitehall Inn, the town hall and community center, Hamaker's ferriers, and J.M. Hendrix Grist Mill, which produced "celebrated Putnamville flour." Putnamville vied to become the location of Asbury College, later named Depauw University, but the college opened in Greencastle, winning by a difference of $5000 and 57 more citizens. A fire on May 26, 1878, destroyed numerous prosperous businesses. Noted visitors included likely visits by Abraham Lincoln and President Van Buren, Johnny Appleseed, and Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," on her concert tour of the west in 1851. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher preached in the 1834 Presbyterian, later United Methodist, Church on 10-12-1839. In 2005, Georgia Sublette said in her oral history that Putnamville had once been a thriving little town where neighbors knew one another, attended church, and had a school house, and that it had been very different from what it later became.