The two townships in numbers: what the censuses print, and what they do not

1836–2022 · CLAY AND HARRIS TOWNSHIPS, IN THE COUNTY FRAME

The farm record of this ground is a township record, and the printed numbers for it are thinner than the numbers for the county — this entry states both, at their own strengths, before any crop is narrated. The censuses of agriculture count farms by county, not by township, and South Bend's build carries the county series whole from the census volumes: 2,408 farms on 221,456 acres in 1950 (average 92 acres), 1,364 farms on 194,838 acres in 1969, 1,112 on 181,138 in 1974, and the modern profiles closing the series — 691 farms on 151,975 acres in 2012, 629 on 149,981 (average 238) in 2017, and 547 farms on 153,034 acres (average 280) in 2022, with a sales value of $162,244,000 in the last count. Against the county's land area as the modern gazetteer states it, roughly 293,000 acres, the 2022 figure is about 52 percent of the county in farms, against 71 percent in 1954. Those are the frame numbers; they are printed here at pointer size because the frame governs the townships' story, and they are not re-derived.

Inside the frame, the county's own nineteenth-century account is Chapman's history of 1880, whose thirteenth chapter, "Agriculture in St. Joseph County," prints the county at its wheat height: "In 1879 there were threshed 811,037 bushels of wheat, 143,791 bushels of oats, and 829,554 bushels of corn." The same chapter prints a table, "Agricultural Products of St. Joseph County for 1880," township by township — Clay and Harris each with its own row, drawn from the assessors' returns — and that table is the one place in the printed record where the two townships' farm output stands counted on its own. The table survives on the printed page (Chapman, pp. 664–665); the machine-read copies of the volume reached interleave its columns past reliable reconstruction, and its township figures are therefore carried in this section's gaps roll as a named gap with the printed page as its settler, rather than rebuilt here from scrambled numerals. What the townships' own magnitudes were at that date, the record's other instruments do state, and the entries below print them: the 1875 atlas's patrons' directory for Harris, read whole in this build's Land leg; Chapman's township chapters, whose biographical sketches give the working holdings farm by farm (sixty acres at the small end, 460 at the large); and the township areas themselves — Harris at 13,329 acres in Chapman's table against 13,517 in the Census Bureau's, a conflict the Land leg prints whole and this section does not touch. No later census of agriculture prints a township line for Clay or Harris in any volume, and no township farm count after 1880 is stated anywhere in this section: the twentieth-century course of the two townships is carried below from the farm-by-farm record, the institutional record, and, at its end, the county parcel file — each at its own stated strength.

Sources:

1. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 1; the 1974 Census of Agriculture county data; the county comprehensive plan's 1982–1997 readings; and the 2012/2017/2022 Census of Agriculture county profiles and Vol. 1, Ch. 2 tables — carried there whole; printed here at pointer size.
2. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. XIII, "Agriculture in St. Joseph County": the 1879 threshing figures in the words quoted, and the township table "Agricultural Products of St. Joseph County for 1880" (pp. 664–665) — read first-hand from the published text (archive.org, historyofstjosep00chap); the table's figures not reconstructed from the interleaved machine text (see the gaps roll, GAP-FARMS-1).
3. This build's Land leg: the 1875 atlas patrons' directory for Harris read whole; the Harris Township area conflict (Chapman 13,329 acres vs Census 13,517) printed whole there.
4. Chapman (1880), Harris and Clay township chapters: the biographical holdings pattern — read first-hand as above.