Before the cemeteries: burial on a settlement ground

1830–1834 · THE PRACTICE BEFORE THE FIRST GROUND

The settlers of 1830 buried their first dead four years before this ground had a burying ground: Harris Prairie Cemetery's sign and record date its opening to 1834 — after the first land entries of April 1830, and two years before Harris Township itself was organized in January 1836. Where the settlement's dead of 1830 to 1834 were laid, no record reached says: the county histories as this build carries them name the settlers, the land entries, the first schoolhouse, and the churches to come, but no first grave. The era's practice on such ground is not in doubt as practice — a family buried its own, on the farm, until a common ground was set apart — and the one family burial of the settlement era documented on these townships' ground shows the form exactly, a decade later and just beyond the line: the Quaker settler Jonas Harris, buried on his own mill farm in Clay Township's river west about 1843 at his own request, his wife Barbara beside him, the neighbors buried there later removed to other cemeteries while the Harrises remain — printed here as the boundary it is, with its course carried by the Religion and Before the City legs. The pre-1834 burial place of the Harris Prairie settlement itself is entered in the closing roll as a named gap, with Germaine Goff's History of Harris Township and Howard's township sketches named as its settlers.

What the ground holds now, whole, is three grounds and a boundary roll. Inside the line stand the two cemeteries Harris Township keeps — Harris Prairie on Adams Road and Salem on Ash Road — the federal geographic record naming exactly those two for the township, no more. At the place's southwestern doorstep stands its great modern ground, St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park on Cleveland Road, told whole below with its line stated. West and south beyond the line stand the older churchyards and family grounds of the valley's first burying century — the Brooks family's Tutt-Stuckey acre, the Ulery ground, Sumption Prairie's churchyard — each printed as boundary with the line stated. The pattern that governs the whole roll was named by this build's Religion section, and it is the grounds' own fact as much as the churches': on this ground the township, not the churches, became the keeper of the dead.

Sources:

1. The Religion section of this build — the burying grounds in the churches' frame: the 1834 opening, the township keeping, the Jonas Harris farm burial in Howard's telling (quoting the South Bend Weekly Tribune, July 6, 1901), printed there at pointer size and here as boundary.
2. The Government leg of this build — Harris Township's two cemeteries, their keeping, and the rule of burials; Clay Township's named cemetery.
3. U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System, as gathered in the GraveRoots township lists — Harris Township: two cemeteries; Clay Township: three; the coordinates as printed in the articles below.