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What ground this section covers — the census frame, the congressional frame, and the ground's own features
The census frame: Granger is a census-designated place, not an incorporated town; it has no municipal boundary, and the frame this section works in is the Census Bureau's. As the current record gives it, the CDP lies in Clay and Harris townships — 30,337 people at the census of 2020, at 801 feet above sea level (the GNIS figure), on ground the 2020 United States Gazetteer Files measure at 24.68 square miles. An older figure stands in the same record: the area carried from the 2010 census frame is 26.2 square miles. Both are printed because the record carries both; the 24.68 is the current gazetteer measurement. The composition has changed within living census memory: earlier frames of this CDP ran in Penn and Harris townships, and the Penn Township strip along the place's south side passed to the city of Mishawaka by annexation while the designated place grew west into Clay Township. The frame is stated as the record states it — a designated place whose edges are a statistician's, laid over a ground whose real boundaries are older: a state line, a township line, a prairie, a creek.
The congressional frame: Under the census frame lies the survey frame, and it is the survey frame this section is written in. The body of the ground is congressional township 38 north, range 3 east of the Second Principal Meridian — Harris Township's township — fractional at its southwest where the river cuts the corner away, running north to the Indiana–Michigan line. West of it, the CDP takes in the eastern strip of Clay Township: congressional ground of township 38 north, range 2 east east of the river, together with the strip two sections wide that was Harris ground until the county board detached it to Clay in 1840 and 1842 — so that the place's western ground was settled, as the last entries of this section show, as part of Harris. East, the ground runs to the Elkhart County line. The township's Section 11 — second tier from the state line, toward the Elkhart side — is inside this frame, and it matters to everything that follows: the first two entries of land ever made in St. Joseph County were made in Section 11, on this ground, on the first day the county's land came to market.
The ground's own features: Three features name the ground before any settlement. The first is the line itself: the northern boundary of Indiana, run in the autumn of 1827 — surveyed, as the survey entry below shows, while the land south of it was still Potawatomi country. The second is Harris Prairie, one of the county's principal prairies in every period list — an upland prairie in the township's northern body, named, with the township, for the settler who came to it in 1830. The third is the water: Juday Creek, a groundwater-fed tributary twelve miles long, rises in this ground's farm fields and runs west across the Clay strip and the university ground to the St. Joseph River; the township's marsh lowland drained south by a second, slighter stream, known farther down as Sheffield Creek. The river that made the valley never enters the frame. This ground is the valley's north rim — the hills Montgomery's glacial flood ran against — and its history before settlement is the history of an upcountry: hunted, crossed, and held from the river towns, entered and farmed the moment the land office opened.
Sources: United States Census Bureau, 2020 Gazetteer Files and the 2020 census, as carried in the Granger, Indiana place record — the Clay-and-Harris composition, the population of 30,337, the 24.68-square-mile gazetteer area against the 26.2 figure of the earlier frame; United States Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System — the 801-foot elevation; Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, vol. 1 (1907), Chapter V, §3 — the Harris bounds and the 1840 and 1842 detachments to Clay; Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the principal-prairies list naming Harris, in Harris township; the frame's earlier Penn-and-Harris composition as carried in the census record of the place before the current frame.