William Polke House

Built in 1834 by William Polke, the first white settler in Fulton County, this was the county’s oldest and first frame house and the first frame house built north of the Wabash River. Known as the White House, it served as a stagecoach inn on the Michigan Road. Born in 1775, Polke was captured at age 7 and held prisoner by Indians for more than a year. He was wounded in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, served in the Indiana Territorial House of Representatives and in the first State Senate, took part in the convention that wrote the first Indiana constitution in 1816, and with his brother-in-law Isaac McCoy was a missionary to Indians in 1824-25. Appointed in 1829 as commissioner for the sale of Michigan Road lands, he came to Fulton County in 1830 to survey. In 1831, on the south bank of the Tippecanoe, he built a log cabin and trading post that housed the Chippeway post office, making him the county’s first postmaster. In 1834 he helped lay out the town of Plymouth. In 1838, when Gen. John Tipton oversaw the removal of Potawatomi Indians from northern Indiana to Kansas on the infamous Trail of Death, Tipton left Polke in charge of the march at the Indiana state line, and Polke befriended the Indians in every way he could. Polke moved to Fort Wayne in 1841 to serve as registrar of the land office there, where he died in 1843.

Indiana · United States