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The map that decided Fort Wayne's shape was not drawn in Fort Wayne at all. It was the federal rectangular survey, run off the Second Principal Meridian — the north–south survey line established in 1805 from the Ohio River, from which, as The Land chapter tells, all of central and northern Indiana is measured. Allen County lies in townships 29 to 32 north, ranges 11 to 15 east of that meridian, a checkerboard of six-mile townships and one-mile sections laid over the Miami country; the future townsite sat in Section 2, Township 30 North, Range 12 East.
Congress organized the selling of it by the Act of May 8, 1822 (3 Statutes at Large 741), which created the Fort Wayne land district — the lands ceded at St. Mary's in October 1818, east of the range line between ranges 1 and 2 east of the Second Principal Meridian and north of the line between townships 20 and 21 north, bounded east by the Ohio state line. The act is careful in a way that tells the sequence of the work: appointments to the new land office waited until enough of the district had actually been surveyed to justify opening it. Deputy surveyors ran the township exteriors and section lines through 1822 and 1823, and the land office opened for sales on October 22, 1823, in a room of the old fort, as the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee records.
The surveyors' plats and field notes were the county's first precise maps, and they are still its legal foundation. Where they live now is a two-archive answer. The Bureau of Land Management's GLO Records site serves the federal record — the land patents together with the survey plats and field notes that support them. The Indiana State Archives holds the Indiana side of the record — surveyors' field notes, plat maps, and tract books for the whole state — and since 1876, when the federal land records for Indiana were transferred to the state, Indianapolis has been the deeper archive of the two. The survey's physical marks still carry weight: the Allen County Surveyor's cornerstones — four to the square mile, with half-mile markers between — underpin the county's modern GIS and its 911 addressing, a point the surveyor's office itself makes to genealogists.
Sources: Act of May 8, 1822, 3 Stat. 741 (U.S. Statutes at Large); Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), Part 24, on the land office opening October 22, 1823; Bureau of Land Management, GLO Records (glorecords.blm.gov); Indiana Archives and Records Administration, land records pages (in.gov/iara), on field notes, plats, tract books, and the 1876 transfer; ACGSI genealogy resources pages, quoting the Allen County Surveyor's office on cornerstones.