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COUNTY ORGANIZATION · THE COMMISSIONERS' RECORD AS THE 1875 ATLAS REPRINTS IT
St. Joseph County's first government was a court: the county was organized in 1830 under a Board of Justices — the justices of the peace of the county sitting together as its governing body. It was that board which, on November 25, 1830, laid out German Township and ordered the sheriff to notify its voters to elect their officers; the townships this section concerns were still unorganized prairie. On January 19, 1831, the General Assembly replaced the justices' board with a Board of County Commissioners, and on the first Monday of September 1831 the new board met at the house of Alexis Coquillard in South Bend. Among its first acts, preserved in the Commissioners' Record and reprinted in the county's 1875 atlas, was a payment that fixes the first name in this section's succession: Samuel L. Cottrell was allowed $32 "for services rendered as sheriff of said county." Chapman, writing in 1880, carries the same man further: Cottrell, who had settled at the trading post in 1828, "afterward became quite influential in the affairs of the county, serving as Sheriff for several terms, besides holding other important offices."
At the November term of 1831 the board built the rest of the founding apparatus in a single order, and the atlas reprints it in full: "Calvin Lilly, Joseph Cissna, Druliner, and John Garrard were appointed constables, and the order for building a jail was spread upon the records in extenso" — the record itself citing "Commissioners' Record, first book, p. 35, Auditor's office, South Bend." (The third constable's given name is imperfectly preserved in the atlas text; the surname stands.) The same entry fixes the succession's second name: "At this time, Benjamin McCarty was sheriff, and was allowed [a sum] for assessing the unassessed property of St. Joseph County." The record therefore shows two men in the sheriff's office within the county's first civil year — Cottrell paid for sheriff's services at the September term, McCarty holding the office by November — and this section prints both as the record gives them, in the record's order, without electing a single "first sheriff" the documents do not elect. At the January term of 1832 the board drew the county's jury panels, grand and petit both.
Onto this frame the designated place's own ground was organized. Harris Township was formed at the January term of 1836 and Clay Township was built partly from Harris ground in 1840–1842 — both formations carried whole in the Government leg — and from those dates the prairie answered to the apparatus above: a felony on Harris Prairie was the circuit court's business at South Bend, a prisoner from Clay Township rode to the log jail the commissioners had ordered in 1831, and the only officers of the law seated on the ground itself were the township's own, taken up in the next article.
Sources: Combination Atlas Map of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1875), historical sketch (the Board of Justices' order of November 25, 1830; the act of January 19, 1831; the September 1831 term — Cottrell's $32; the November term, 1831 — the four constables, the jail order, McCarty as sheriff; the jury panels of January 1832), read first-hand. Chapman (1880) (Cottrell's settlement of 1828 and his several terms as sheriff). Howard (1907), as carried in the Government leg (the Clay detachments of 1840 and 1842; Harris formed January 5, 1836, on the commissioners' order).