The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The land comes to market — and the first two names in the county's tract books are Harris Prairie names
The market opens: The taking of 1828 made the ground the United States'; the survey made it describable; the land office made it buyable. Chapman's county history fixes the sequence in its "First Entries of Land" record, carried in the Mishawaka history and dug against here for this ground: "The lands in St. Joseph county… did not come into market until the spring of 1830. The first entries made were on the 19th day of April, of the same year." The office of the first market was Crawfordsville — the northern lands were offered through Fort Wayne and Crawfordsville before 1833, on the Indiana Archives' district history — and the machinery was the General Land Office's: the plat book showed the parcel, the Register entered the application in the tract book, the Receiver took the payment — $1.25 an acre at the minimum, forty acres the smallest tract — and the patent issued; every transfer after the patent is a county record. The La Porte land district, which would handle this county's later sales, opened with its first sale on 12 August 1833, covering nineteen counties including St. Joseph; it moved to Winamac in 1839 and closed on 31 January 1855, its unsold lands passing to Indianapolis; 48,562 entries stand indexed from its tract books in the Indiana Archives.
The first two entries in the county: Both were made on this ground. On 19 April 1830, in Section 11, township 38 north, range 3 east — the second tier of sections below the state line, toward the Elkhart side of the township — John Johnston entered the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter, and Samuel Bell entered the southeast quarter of the southwest quarter: forty acres each, side by side across the section's south half, the first two entries of land in St. Joseph County. "Other entries rapidly followed," Chapman continues, "and during the first year a large quantity of the most valuable land in the county was taken up"; by 1836, on the western county's account carried in the Mishawaka file, "about all the Government land was taken up." The county's land history does not begin at the river towns or the county seat. It begins on the Harris Prairie upland, in a section that is today inside the Granger census frame, by two men whose names the next paragraph separates — because the record separates them.
The entrymen: Samuel Bell was a settler making his entry, and the record proves the kind: Howard's Harris sketch states it in one clause — "Samuel Bell came with his father-in-law, Jacob Harris." Bell entered his forty acres in the first hour of the first day of the market as the son-in-law of the prairie's first settler, in the party that had come to the prairie to stay; his name runs forward in the township's life from that entry. John Johnston stands otherwise in the record reached: co-entrant of the county's first entry day, holder of the forty acres adjoining Bell's on the west, and not named among Howard's very early settlers of Harris Township, nor placed by any source reached. Whether Johnston settled, sold, or never saw the land, the tract book and the deed records would say; the histories do not. The asymmetry is printed as it stands — one entryman anchored in the settlement record, one standing in the entry record alone — and the note that accompanies this section names the settling sources for Johnston's forty.
The settlement the entries served: The party behind the entries was on the ground the same spring. Howard's Harris sketch, read first-hand for this section, is the settlement record whole: "The prairie and the township both received their name from Jacob Harris, who settled in the township in 1830. In the same year or the year previous came the Baldwins, David and Josephus. Samuel Bell came with his father-in-law, Jacob Harris. During the same year, 1830, came Adam Miller, a Baptist preacher; also Adam Ringle. Other very early settlers were: Joseph Buell, Henry Augustine, Jacob Meyer, Mr. Hartzell, Robert Kennedy, David Ringle and his sons Samuel and Levi, Arbogast Zaehnle, W. and E. M. Irvin and James Lowry." The Baldwins' "same year or the year previous" — 1829 or 1830 — is the earliest settlement beat on this ground in any source reached: someone of the Harris party may have been on the prairie a full season before the land office opened, holding a claim the law could not yet sell them. The 1875 atlas's county history corroborates the roll at county strength, in its set-piece on the county's first settlers: "Bells, Millers, Ringles, Baldwins, etc., in Harris Township" — the same surnames, in the same order of arrival, five years before Chapman and a generation before Howard. The settlement's first institutions stand in Howard's sketch at their size: the first schoolhouse was of logs, fourteen by sixteen feet, with a stick-and-clay chimney; "The first school master was Robert Kennedy," himself on the settlers' list; the churches organized in the township were the Presbyterian, the Evangelical and the Christian. The prairie they settled was the township's heart then as the frame entry describes it — one of the county's principal prairies, an upland of light soil among the oak openings, with the marsh lowland below it that Sheffield Creek drained. Settlement on this ground did not follow the entries by years, as it did in the river towns' speculative plats. It was the same act: a family party, a prairie, and two forty-acre entries made the morning the market opened.
Sources: Chapman (1880), "First Entries of Land" and the Olive Township account — the spring 1830 market, the 19 April 1830 entries of Johnston and Bell in Section 11, township 38 north, range 3 east, the rapid following entries and the Crawfordsville office — as carried in the Mishawaka history and re-stated here for this ground; Indiana Archives and Records Administration, land district history — the La Porte district's first sale of 12 August 1833, the Winamac removal, the 1855 closure and the 48,562 indexed entries, as carried in the Mishawaka leg; Howard (1907), Chapter V, §3 — Jacob Harris, Samuel Bell's coming with him, the Baldwins' year, the 1830 party and the very-early-settlers list whole, the first schoolhouse and schoolmaster, the township's churches — read first-hand for this section; An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875), county history — the principal prairies and the Harris settler roll.