Granger Before the Town: The Ground Before the Place

Before the City · the ground before the place

Before Granger was a name it was a ground: the upland between the St. Joseph River's north bend and the Michigan state line, in what is now Harris Township and the eastern strip of Clay Township, St. Joseph County, Indiana. No river touches it. Its water is a creek that rises in its own farm fields and runs west to the river; its one named surface is a prairie; its north fence is a survey line run in 1827, before the ground beneath it had been ceded. this section is that ground's record before settlement, at the size the record gives it: the drift and the lobes that laid it, the river's making as seen from the rim that confined the old river, the fossil record, the peoples of the valley in their sequence, the French century that governed the valley from upriver posts, the traders, the treaties that took the ground and the one band the treaties let stay, the removal, the survey, and the first entries — which are, on this ground, the county's first entries of all. Where the record speaks at county or valley scale, the boundary is printed and the scale stated; where a fact belongs to this ground alone, it is dug here from the county histories read first-hand, the treaty texts, and the survey literature. Where the record is negative, the negative is printed with the search that produced it, and what could not be covered stands as a named gap with the source that would settle it.