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2 March 1827 — Act of Congress, 4 Stat. 236
The transaction: The United States had already, by the act of 26 May 1824, authorized Indiana to survey a canal through the public lands between the Wabash and the Maumee and reserved ninety feet of land on each side of the line for it — an easement, the federal lawyers later insisted, not a fee. The act of 2 March 1827 made the state a proprietor. For a canal from the mouth of the Tippecanoe to the foot of the Maumee rapids, Congress granted Indiana "a quantity of land equal to one-half of five sections in width on each side of said canal," the United States reserving each alternate section — the first use, in the standard economic histories, of the alternate-section grant policy. At 3,200 acres for every mile of canal, the gift ran the whole proposed line, and the General Land Office's 1878 accounting put the land ultimately patented to Indiana under the canal acts of 1827–1848 at 1,457,363.06 acres statewide. The grant carried its terms: work to begin within five years, the canal to be finished within twenty, the land to be sold by the state for the canal and no other purpose.
On this ground: Around Fort Wayne the grant meant that every other section along the canal line belonged to Indiana, to be selected, appraised and sold by the Board of Canal Commissioners — Samuel Hanna of Fort Wayne was one of the three commissioners named in 1828 — through sales that ran beside the federal land office's own. The selection collided with the reserves: in January 1830 the General Assembly memorialized Congress that 143 of the donated sections had been found inside Indian reservations whose title was not yet extinguished, that 14,690 acres more lay inside tracts already reserved by treaty to individuals, and 11,478.78 acres of the selections had already been sold — and asked for lieu lands. And the canal's local land story includes the town plat itself: of the forty acres of the old military reservation, the western twenty went to the county (next section of this section but one), and the eastern twenty, in John W. Dawson's account, was "set apart for Canal land," bought and laid out in forty lots as Taber's Addition — Cyrus Taber's plat, the canal grant arriving inside the town's own street plan.
Sources: Acts of 26 May 1824 (4 Stat. 47) and 2 March 1827 (4 Stat. 236); Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1 May 1878, in Senate Executive Document, 45th Congress (the 1,457,363.06 acres patented); Indiana Magazine of History (1907), "The Wabash and Erie Canal" (the 3,200-acres-per-mile measure); Indiana General Assembly memorial, approved 29 January 1830 (the 143 sections, 14,690 acres, 11,478.78 acres sold); Dawson, Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne (1872) — Taber's Addition.