The prairie trade: a farm economy with no mill seat and no plat

1830–1907 · HARRIS AND CLAY TOWNSHIPS

The first fact of Granger's business record is a negative the record states itself: Timothy Edward Howard's History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), in the Harris Township section read first-hand for this build (vol. 1, pp. 279–280), records a township economy of grain and livestock in which no mill seat rose on the creeks and no village plat was ever laid out. The settlers Howard names from 1830 — Jacob Harris, for whom the prairie and then the township were named; David and Josephus Baldwin; Samuel Bell; Adam Miller; Adam Ringle; and the families who followed, Buell, Augustine, Meyer, Hartzell, Kennedy, the Ringles, Zaehnle, the Irvins, Lowry — were farmers, and the commerce their settlement generated was the kind a farming township generates without a town: produce hauled out to South Bend and Mishawaka markets, goods hauled back, blacksmithing and storekeeping done at crossroads stands or in the neighboring towns. By Chapman's county account, effectively all of the government land in the township had been taken up by 1836, and the 1875 atlas prints Harris Township as what it remained for another century: a wholly private farm map, section lines and owners' names, with no commercial center marked on it.

The roads were the trade routes. Adams Road — the old Chicago Trail — carried stage traffic across the township's south, and the Story of Granger section of this build carries the remembered stage stop at a still-standing brick house across from present-day Covington Shores, where tradition holds that Father Edward Sorin and a Father Granger said Mass in the mid-1800s; no source connects the priest's name to the place's name, and the entry there prints the tradition as tradition. Cleveland Road, across the north, served the farm that became the ground's largest single enterprise of the century (carried in its own entry below). What the record does not give this era is names: no storekeeper, no blacksmith, no tavern keeper of Harris Prairie is named in the county histories or directories. That absence is itself the finding, and the names, if the directory record holds them, are carried as a named gap at the end of this section rather than invented here.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 279–280 (Harris Township), read first-hand in the Story of Granger section pass of this build.
2. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), land-entry account, as carried in this build's Before the City leg.
3. Andreas & Baskin, Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875), Harris Township plate, as carried in this build's Before the City leg.