The surveys: how this ground was read, and by whom

1981–2007 and the SHAARD record

This ground was surveyed — as part of the county, not as a place. The Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory (IHSSI), the state architectural survey run by the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology (DHPA) with Indiana Landmarks from 1978 to 2012 across 85 of Indiana's 92 counties, produced three printed reports covering this county, all still listed by Indiana Landmarks as available: St. Joseph County, St. Joseph–Mishawaka and St. Joseph–South Bend. The South Bend volume's lineage is documented two ways, printed whole because they differ in date, not in substance: Notre Dame Magazine records that John W. Stamper, then director and planner of the local Historic Preservation Commission, began the meticulous inventory of South Bend and St. Joseph County sites in 1980, and Building South Bend cites Stamper's City of South Bend: Summary Report, Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory (Historic Preservation Commission, 1981) alongside the 2007 interim report, City of South Bend Historic Sites and Structures: An Interim Report of the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory (HPC and Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, 2007). The library record (IUCAT) carries the published City of South Bend, Summary Report as a 1993 HPC volume of 246 pages, funded by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources/DHPA, the St. Joseph County Board of Commissioners and the South Bend Department of Economic Development. The Commission's own current count of the yield: "About 6,000 sites and structures have been identified in architectural surveys as Outstanding, Notable, or Contributing resources of the area's history."

The survey's working papers survive as the Commission's survey cards — the HPC page links a Survey Cards file through docs.southbendin.gov — and the state's copy lives in SHAARD, the State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database maintained by DHPA, which Indiana Landmarks describes as providing "access to limited survey records." Harris and Clay township properties were carded under the county inventory; the individual cards for individual Granger farmhouses and buildings are in that SHAARD/HPC card record, which is the settling source for any single property's survey rating. Separately, and not to be confused with the architectural survey, the county's cemeteries were read by Toni Cook's cemetery survey, carried in the Cemeteries file. What never happened is also printed: no survey of Granger as a place — no CDP-wide, village or neighbourhood survey — was ever run; the CDP appears in the record only as township sections of a county inventory.