The small-grounds test: family plots and churchyards inside the line

TESTED NOVEMBER 2026 · THE FEDERAL NAME RECORD WHOLE

Every burying ground the record names for the two townships has now been placed, and the test that remains is the negative space: the federal geographic record names exactly two cemeteries in Harris Township — Harris Prairie and Salem, both told above — and three in Clay Township: the memorial park, told above with its line, and the Tutt and Ullery grounds, which stand west beyond the line and are printed in the boundary article below. No fourth Harris ground and no Clay ground inside the line appears in that record. Family burial plots of the atlas era — the squared acre in a farm's corner that the nineteenth-century plats mark with a cross — stand inside the line in no record reached: the one settlement-era family burial documented on these townships' ground is Jonas Harris's, on Clay's river west, outside the line and printed as boundary; the Harris Prairie settlement's own families went instead to the common ground of 1834, which is itself the fact that makes this ground's pattern — a shared prairie cemetery before any churchyard — the exception the Religion section names.

The churchyard test runs the same way. Of all the congregations seated on this ground in two centuries, exactly one keeps a burying ground beside its door: Salem, and even Salem's ground is kept by the township, not the congregation. St. Pius X, the ground's large Catholic parish, keeps no cemetery in the record reached — the valley's Catholic dead of this ground go to the diocesan and city grounds of South Bend, at pointer size below. Granger Community Church and the place's other congregations keep none. The German Baptist test, which the frame invites because the county's German settlement was strong, resolves west of the line: the county's first erected church building was a German Baptist brick church of 1851, its congregation organized in 1831, and it stood in German Township, west of this ground entirely; that township's own deeded burying grounds — Cripe-Witter, deeded to German Township in 1844, and Portage Prairie, established 1836 — are German Township's record, not this ground's. A Baptist preacher, Adam Miller, was among Harris Prairie's settlers of 1830, but Howard organizes no Baptist church on this ground, and no Baptist burying ground follows one. The tests stand as tested negatives in the closing roll.

Sources:

1. U.S. Geological Survey GNIS, via the GraveRoots township lists — Harris Township: Harris Prairie and Salem, two cemeteries; Clay Township: St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park, Tutt Cemetery, Ullery Cemetery, three.
2. The Religion section of this build — the congregations of the ground and their seats; the German Baptist church of 1851 in German Township (Howard, German Township sketch); Adam Miller, Baptist preacher, in the 1830 settler list; Salem as the one church ground, township-kept.
3. German Township's cemetery record (germantownshipsb.com) — Cripe-Witter Cemetery, deeded February 12, 1844; Portage Prairie Cemetery, established 1836; printed to fix the boundary of the German Baptist test, not as this ground's record.