![]() Area resident Dempsey Seybold won the contract for a new, two-story courthouse on the square that added 640 square feet to the old building’s size.Įlsewhere, Clay County continued to grow. Back in Bowling Green, county officials had no intention of relocating and ordered a new brick courthouse in 1839, hoping it would dissuade any dissident attempts to move the county seat. Towns like Anguilla and Jonesboro were founded quickly, only to be abandoned as fast as work on the waterway stalled. Other communities sprung up around Clay County as investors threw money towards the land surrounding what were expected to become feeders for the Wabash and Erie Canal 2. Two pieces of Civil War artillery sit on the courthouse square in Brazil here’s one. The first courthouse was a two-story log building that stood across the street from the town square. Established in 1829, the settlement was named after the area’s imagined resemblance to a park in New York that served as a venue for lawn bowling 1. Before Brazil, BRAY-zuhl, or whatever you want to call it was even a place, the seat of Clay County was established at Bowling Green near a bend in the Eel River. If you guessed that an Indiana courthouse in a city named after a South American country had a convoluted geopolitical history, you’d be right. Some citizens in Clay County even refer to their city as BRAY-zuhl! It’s probably best not to mention how Hoosiers mangle the name of Russiaville. Through my travels, I’ve heard locals in Lebanon pronounce it as leh-BANNin, and people in Peru call the town PIER-ooh. ![]() I guarantee that neither my brother nor my sister has been to all those places, and although I left the translation guides at home during my homegrown international road trip, it would have been smart to bring an English dictionary along just in case: even if residents in Peru, Brazil, and Lebanon Indiana aren’t speaking Spanish, Portuguese, or Arabic, it’s sometimes not clear what version of English they are employing. The 1914 Clay County Courthouse in Bray-zul, Indiana. ![]() Years after my brother’s trip to Brazil and my sister’s time in Germany, though, it looks like I can finally say that the joke’s on them: here in the Hoosier state, a six-hour drive can take you all over the world from Mexico to Peru, Mecca, Brazil, Lebanon, Galveston and back- even cramming in a stop at Kokomo to see the Beach Boys on your way home. I’m the only one of my siblings not to have been a foreign exchange student.
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