LaGrange marked the one hundredth anniversary of the town’s founding on June 13, 1836, with a centennial stone erected in 1936. LaGrange County had been established by act of the Indiana Legislature in 1832, sixteen years after Indiana was admitted as a state in 1816. The county and county seat took their name from LaGrange, the estate of General LaFayette in France. Tradition holds that this region was first visited by a white man in 1676, when a French missionary reportedly traveled through it en route from the St. Joseph River to the Indiana village of Kehionga, now Fort Wayne, and LaSalle is believed to have visited four years later. The territory was inhabited by the Potowatomi Indians, and Mongaquiong, near the present site of Howe and Shipshewana Village on the shores of Shipshewana Lake, were important Indian villages. The first white settlement was at Howe, formerly Lima, in 1828, one of the first towns north of Fort Wayne. The LaGrange Collegiate Institute, the first college west of Oberlin, Ohio, was established at Ontario five miles northeast in 1837. The county seat was removed from Lima to LaGrange in 1844, and LaGrange was incorporated in 1855. LaGrange County has more than fifty lakes and five streams, and its fertile lands give it high rank in the state agriculturally.