Farms & Agriculture: Open Questions

THE RECORD AS IT STANDS, NOVEMBER 2026

Each names the settling source, as this build's practice requires.

• GAP-FARMS-1 — Chapman's township products table, 1880. The "Agricultural Products of St. Joseph County for 1880" (Chapman, ch. XIII, pp. 664–665) prints Clay's and Harris's output row by row from the assessors' returns — the only township-level farm count in the printed record. The machine-read copies reached interleave its columns past reliable reconstruction. Settler: the printed page image (archive.org/HathiTrust page images of Chapman 1880, pp. 664–665), read at page strength.
• GAP-FARMS-2 — A subordinate grange of Clay or Harris. No grange of either township stands in Chapman, Howard, the atlas, or the order's published record as reached; the order's county presence is documented in Warren Township (the Wyckoffs). Settlers: the Indiana State Grange journals of proceedings, 1870s–1880s subordinate lists; Germaine Goff, The History of Harris Township (1980) — the township history the Story of Granger section cites, read in this build only through the trustee's published account.
• GAP-FARMS-3 — Farm Bureau township locals. The county bureau stands in South Bend's build; no Clay or Harris township local, and no county bureau founding record before its 1945–46 corporate dating, stands in the record reached. Settlers: the St. Joseph County Farm Bureau's own records; the Purdue extension narrative reports for St. Joseph County (Purdue University Archives).
• GAP-FARMS-4 — Township mechanization. No tractor, binder, or thresher count at township strength in any source reached; the county succession stands in South Bend's build from the 1954 census. Settlers: the manuscript schedules and county extension agent annual reports (Bordner's and his successors'), Purdue University Archives; the 1920–1940 census of agriculture county tables for the county line.
• GAP-FARMS-5 — The Osceola creamery's own dates. The creamery's existence, farmer-stockholder form, and 1915 market presence are documented; its founding and closing years are not in the record reached. Settler: the Indiana state dairy/food department annual reports' creamery lists; the Tribune archive.
• GAP-FARMS-6 — Township farm counts after 1880. No census of agriculture volume reached prints Clay or Harris farm counts, acreage, or values for any year after Chapman's table. Settlers: the manuscript agriculture schedules, 1850–1880 (Indiana State Archives / NARA), for the early course; the county auditor's township assessment abstracts for the later.
• GAP-FARMS-7 — St. Joseph's Farm's internal course, 1900–1995. The farm's founding strands, its 1870s operation, its 1995 end, and its ground's division are documented; its twentieth-century operation — herd and crop course, the brothers' community's size over time, its land sales parcel by parcel — rests in the congregation's and the university's archives. Settlers: the Saint Joseph's Farm Collection (SCF), Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame Archives, including Brother Carl Tiedt's The Peat Bog: St. Joseph's Farm; the County Recorder's deed record for the sales (with GAP-BIZ-3, the deed-level seller of the 929-acre data-center purchase, in the Businesses leg).

Sources:

1. The gaps are this section's own, raised at the places named in the entries above; GAP-BIZ-8 (the Granger Farmers Market's founding year) and GAP-BIZ-3 ride in the Food and Businesses legs respectively and are pointed to, not duplicated.