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The state line of 1827, the meridian grid, and the field notes this township still owes the record
The line first: This ground's north fence was surveyed before the ground was ceded — the survey preceded the taking, and the taking's own instrument begins its calls on the surveyor's line. The Enabling Act of 19 April 1816 set Indiana's north boundary as an east–west line through a point ten miles north of Lake Michigan's southern extreme. In June 1817 William Harris set the corner at that extreme, witnessed by two aspens — a surveyor named Harris, no kin the record shows to the Jacob Harris of the prairie below; the names are printed apart because the record keeps them apart. An act of 2 March 1827 authorized the marking of the line, and Surveyor General Edward Tiffin contracted deputy Eleazer P. Kendrick, whose field notes open on 8 October 1827 at the lake's southern extremity: from the 1817 corner he ran east, setting a wooden post at every mile, to the 105th mile. Tiffin certified the plat on 24 November 1827; his report was transmitted on 5 January 1835 (Serial Set 268). Kendrick's notes survive in facsimile at the Indiana State Library, in John McNamara's transcription. When the county's own township deputies ran their lines in the years 1827–1832, they were instructed — on the St. Joseph County Surveyor's boundary history, carried in South Bend press in 2025 — to measure from their own lines to Kendrick's nearest mile post: the fence was the datum for everything south of it. The line is still being re-monumented: Indiana's 2019 law created an Indiana–Michigan Boundary Line Commission, one registered surveyor from each of Elkhart, LaGrange, LaPorte, St. Joseph and Steuben counties, to restore the 1827 mile posts.
The grid: South of the line, the ground was laid out on the Second Principal Meridian: township 38 north, range 3 east for the body of this section's frame; township 38 north, range 2 east, fractional where the river cuts it, for the Clay-side strip; township 37 north, range 3 east — Penn — below the frame's southern edge, where the Mishawaka townsite's school section stood. The county's survey establishment was early and its record partly survives: William Brookfield — Howard calls him "our first surveyor, and the man who laid out our first and our second county seat" — came in 1827 and surveyed Government land throughout the community; William and Noah Brock surveyed Olive Township in 1830; a Penn settler, Nathan W. Young, "carried chain for the Government surveyors"; and a county field survey of 1829 survives entire — field notes, in an 1858 copy, on microfilm in the University of Notre Dame Archives (Saint Joseph County Records, MSJO 1). In November 1831 the county commissioners ordered County Surveyor William Clark to procure certified copies of the land offices' field notes and plat and deposit them in the Recorder's office — the order stands in the commissioners' record as Chapman prints it. One name the record reached does not give: the deputy who surveyed township 38 north, range 3 east itself. He stands as a named gap of this section; the township's General Land Office plat and field notes are his settling source, and they would carry more than his name — the surveyor's own description of the prairie, the marsh and the timber of this ground, line by line, is the fullest pre-settlement account of the ground that exists anywhere, and it has not been pulled for this build.
The school section: The grid carried its endowment in its numbering: Section 16 of every township was the school section, state-administered, its sale funding the township schools. The valley's worked example stands in the neighboring township and is printed here at boundary size because it fixes the frame this ground shares: Penn Township's Section 16 was the Mishawaka townsite, bought by Hurd on 1 January 1833 for $800 — 640 acres at the $1.25 minimum. Harris Township's own school section lay in this section's frame; its entry runs with the township's entries in the tract books, and no source reached singles it out. It is noted here so the frame is complete: the grid that the next entry opens was a school-funding instrument as well as a land instrument, on this ground as on every ground in the county.
Sources: The state-line record — the Enabling Act of 19 April 1816, the act of 2 March 1827, Kendrick's field notes of 8 October 1827, Tiffin's certification of 24 November 1827 and the report of 5 January 1835 (Serial Set 268), and the 2019 Boundary Line Commission law — as carried in the Mishawaka history; the St. Joseph County Surveyor's boundary history, via South Bend press (2025) — the deputies' instruction to measure to Kendrick's posts, as carried in the Mishawaka leg; Howard (1907), Chapter V, §1 — Brookfield, "our first surveyor"; Chapman (1880) — the Brock surveys, Young's chain-carrying, and the November 1831 commissioners' order, as carried in the Mishawaka history; University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County Records MSJO 1 — the 1829 county field survey; the Penn school-section purchase (Hurd, 1 January 1833) as established in the Mishawaka build, printed at boundary size.