Ashley, Indiana

14 topographic sheets cover this place, the earliest surveyed in 1942 and the latest in 1993. It stands in Smithfield Township. It lies in ZIP code area 46705. The Survey maps it on the Ashley quadrangle.

Ashley within DeKalb County

Topographic sheets covering this place

6 surveys from 14 printed sheets

Matched by testing this settlement's coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet in the United States Geological Survey's historical collection. Each opens the scanned sheet at the Survey.

1942 USGS Ashley quadrangle1:24000, 2 printings
1953 USGS Fort Wayne quadrangle1:250000, 4 printings
1956 USGS Fort Wayne quadrangle1:250000, 2 printings
1959 USGS Ashley quadrangle1:24000, 3 printings
1985 USGS Elkhart quadrangle1:100000, 2 printings
1993 USGS Ashley quadrangle1:24000

In the county-history sources

1,855 words on this township

History of Dekalb County, Indiana, with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Old Families, published 1914 names this settlement in its chapter on Smithfield Township. These are the passages that mention it, exactly as the scans read.

The town of Ashley was platted in the year 1892, the origin of the town being due to the building of the Wabash railroad. This railroad company under the name of the Indiana Improvement Company, bought extensive lands on the site of Ashley, and established a division there. The town quickly sprang into life, and was incorporated as a town in the latter part of 1892. Singularly, the town is placed square on the county line between Steuben and DeKalb counties; the main street is the division point. Many peculiar and humorous, as well as inconvenient, situations arise from this fact. The shops and division headquarters were moved in 1907' to Montpelier, Ohio, but notwithstanding the town has continued to grow. The census of 1910 placed the population as six hundred and thirty-nine, but this has increased substantially since. The town officers at present are : G. W. Clark, George Kirlin, and William Zubrugg, trustees ; J. W. Mintzer, clerk ; and George Park, treasurer. The electric light plant is owned by the town, and was installed in 1895 at 2 cost of five thousand dollars. There is one grist mill and one saw mill at Ashley. (12)

Passage source: History of Dekalb County, Indiana, with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Old Families, published 1914.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Smithfield Township.

Fires near this place

5 since 2003

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 5 fires within 5 miles of Ashley between 2003 and 2005, burning about 9 acres in total. None started naturally. 1 was recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Debris and open burning	2
Equipment and vehicle use	1
Recreation and ceremony	1
Arson/incendiarism	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
18 September 2004	Arson/incendiarism	under an acre	Indiana State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
1 June 2003	Debris and open burning	under an acre	Indiana State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
4 April 2005	Recreation and ceremony	3.0 acres	Indiana State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
18 April 2004	Debris and open burning	5.0 acres	Indiana State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
15 April 2004	Equipment and vehicle use	under an acre	Indiana State Fire Marshal's Office	not named

Settlements close enough to share some of these fires:

Every fire recorded in DeKalb County

Nearest settlements

The eight closest, with where each one stands in the county. Distances are straight-line, computed from the Geographic Names Information System coordinates.

Place	Distance	Sheets
Summit	2.3 miles	14
Fairfield Center	4.4 miles	10
Sedan	6.4 miles	11
Taylor Corner	6.8 miles	10
Waterloo	7.0 miles	11
Corunna	7.5 miles	10
Moore	10.8 miles	10
Auburn	11.0 miles	11

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 430312. The sheet list is computed by point-in-boundary test against the United States Geological Survey's historical topographic inventory. Both are works of the United States government and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.

Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.