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1822–1824 — the Second Principal Meridian townships
The system: Ceded land could not be sold until it was surveyed, and the survey that reached Fort Wayne was the federal rectangular survey: townships six miles square, divided into thirty-six sections of 640 acres, numbered off the Second Principal Meridian — the north-south line, established in 1805 from the Ohio River, from which all of central and northeastern Indiana is reckoned. Allen County's townships run from Township 29 to 32 North, Ranges 11 to 15 East of that meridian. The townsite itself sits in Section 2, Township 30 North, Range 12 East — the description John W. Dawson gives for the original plat: "the north fraction of southeast quarter of Section 2, Township 30, North Range 12 East."
The work: The 1818 cession was surveyed in the first years of the 1820s under the Surveyor General's office at Cincinnati, the field parties working outward from the older surveys as each cession allowed, and the Fort Wayne district's township plats were on file in time for the land office to open in October 1823. The surveys did not run inside the reserves: the six miles square, the individual sections and the Ten Mile Reserve were meandered around and left as islands in the grid until their own sales and patents closed them. The deputy surveyors' names for the individual Allen County townships are not established in the sources reached; they stand in the General Land Office field notes and plats at the Indiana Archives and the Bureau of Land Management's records.
Sources: The federal survey system as applied in Indiana (Second Principal Meridian, established 1805); Dawson, Charcoal Sketches (1872) — the plat's section description; Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), land-office chapter — the district not surveyed at its creation in 1822, offices vacant until 1823.