"Supper won't be for an hour," she announced. "Stayin' all night? "

Yes. There are three of us. We'd like a room, please, if you have one."

"Got just one room. Rents to four people. Have to git fifty cents the way things are now. Makes no difference if there's one, two, three or four. All new oats straw in clean ticking Lofts good too. It's clean and sleep ya fer six and a quarter cents a head. No bugs - I run a clean place. Supper an' breakfast 'II cost ya thirty-seven cents."

"I'm sure that will be fine with us. We'll take the room. you want me to sign the register for the three of us?"

"Don't keep no register, Mister, too many of the folks comin' through here can't write anyway." A smile broke across her dour face. "It's nice to have a fine gentleman once in awhile though."

After a hearty meal of roast beef, baked potatoes, raw beets, raw carrots and a goodly slab of apple pie, the men sat awhile swapping news with other travelers. As the twilight dimmed into dusk, they climbed the steep stairway to their room. It was a small cubicle just large enough for the four fully stuffed straw bags that lay directly on the plank floor.

Across the stairway from the room was the loft. McCorkle peered in. It was a larger room, perhaps twenty feet square with a low ceiling that made it appear smaller. A plain board wall enclosed a small section at the front. This was the "ladies" room although as often as not, the women slept with their men, gathering the loose straw to arrange their own beds. Any other bedding or covering was supplied by the traveler.

The precise little merchant from Piqua shook his head. He wondered how his friend John Manning, settler, pioneer, developer of Piqua, land speculator and already a wealthy person in this new country - how had he talked him into this Saint Marys deal. Manning had assured him that this was a golden opportunity, the ground floor, the doorway to a beginning of a tremendous future.

McCorkle was beginning to get the enthusiasm of the frontier. In the last few weeks of working out this "Saint Marys deal" he had learned how to stare into the darkness of a forest and see a sparkling village booming in commerce and surrounded by amber fields of grain. Manning had advised him to go ahead - to take a chance on it. He was beginning to like it. He had become aware of the vast field of opportunity that lay to the north and west.

As McCorkle stretched his slim body out on the straw tick, his mind was rapidly scanning the whole area from Saint Mares to Toledo and Fort Wavne

with the new canal forming one side of a triangle, the Saint Marys and Maumee rivers forming the other two sides. As he dropped into slumber he was thinking to himself, "The canal is some years from digging - but at Ft. Wayne, in Indiana, a man can go either up or down the river and maybe they'll have a canal too! I just might look into that."

Eight months later, on April 2, 1824, McCorkle sold to John Manning and William Berry for the sum of $1500, almost 250 acres of land just south of Saint Marys and 29 lots in the new town. He came in on the ground floor, made a quick profit and got out. Mr. McCorkle was now looking for bigger game.

Shortly after a land office was opened at Fort Wayne, John McCorkle and a Mr. Barr of Baltimore, Maryland, bought for $1.25 per acre the land known as the "Old Plat of Fort Wayne." Within fifteen years some of this land was selling for more than $1.25 per inch of front footage !

The clock the next morning had not yet struck eight when these men were gathered around a large table at John Ingraham's, Justice of the Peace. The "Squire" had gone over the papers and maps presented very meticulously, stopping occasionally to add figures on lot measurements and street widths to insure that everything checked out. Finally he looked up.

"Everything seems to be in order, gentlemen. You will each sign the dedication, and I will take it to the Recorder's Office.

"Although your town of Saint Marys is in Mercer County, this will be filed here in Darke until you folks up there get organized. I wish you good luck-and I do hope you can live down the name of Girtystown-that renegade ! "

Squire Ingraham rose from his chair, and the three men in turn took up the long goose quill pen and affixed their signatures. They all felt a certain solemnity of the occasion. There was no conversation during the signing. The seal was impressed and the certification of the Justice of the Peace was inscribed.

"There's just one thing that I noticed, not that it's wrong, mind you," the Squire stated, "I notice your Front Street is quite a ways from the river. Most places have their Front Streets right on the river bank instead of a couple hundred feet away."

"Now that's an easy one to answer," spoke up William Houston. "You see, the canal surveyors were through already, and they say the canal will stay west of the river through town - so Front Street will front on both the canal and the river. Then the canal will cross over the top of the river on a water-bridge they call an aqua-duct. That will be just at the north edge of our town. They say that a water fall of some twenty feet will give power to saw mills and flouring mills and such."