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1785–1850 — the sections the sales skipped
Section 16: Under the federal land ordinance system Indiana inherited, the sixteenth section of every township was reserved from ordinary sale for the support of public schools — one square mile in every thirty-six, held by the state and later sold or leased under the school laws, its proceeds forming the school fund. Allen County's map carried the reservation from the first township plats: a section in each township that the land office did not sell at the 1823 sales and after, picked out in the same grid as everything else in this section. The companion federal grant for a state seminary of learning — the township of land granted Indiana at statehood — was located in the south of the state, not here, and no university land lay in Allen County; the reservation this county actually held was the school section, township by township.
Swamp lands: The last of the great federal transfers came after the story's main line closes: by the Swamp Land Act of 28 September 1850, the United States granted Indiana its unsold swamp and overflowed lands, the proceeds pledged to reclamation — levees and drains to make the flooded acres farmable. Northeastern Indiana, a glacial lake plain threaded by the three rivers, held more than its share of such ground, and Allen County's swamp-land share passed to county administration and was sold off under the drainage laws across the following decades, financing the ditching that turned the county's wet sections into its farms. The act's statewide acreage accounting belongs to the state's record; this section registers the transfer and its local mechanism without a county acreage figure, which the sources reached do not state.
Sources: Land Ordinance of 1785 and Indiana school-land practice (Section 16); the statehood seminary grant's southern location (Indiana University record); Swamp Land Act of 1850 (9 Stat. 519) and Indiana's swamp-land administration.