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On the record
The sequence on this ground runs in the order the checklist names. Water first: the power that built the county's first industry was the St. Joseph River, and Chapman in 1880 already speaks of it in the past tense of development — the river's great power "developed and utilized," driving scores of manufacturing institutions, while on the farms of Clay and Harris the water that mattered was creek and spring water, Juday Creek's groundwater-fed flow among it, turning no wheel of consequence inside the line. Steam second, and on this ground steam was mostly threshing steam: the separator, adopted across the Midwest in large numbers in the 1850s, was powered first by horses, then by portable steam engines from the 1860s and 1870s, and finally by gas tractors around 1925; the work was organized in threshing rings — neighborhood cooperatives of a dozen to fifty farmers who hired or jointly owned an outfit and moved it farm to farm — a system documented whole for Indiana in the Indiana Magazine of History's study of the White Plains ring, 1920–1943, and ended by the combine. The ring, not the factory, was this ground's steam-age institution, and its dates in Indiana run from the post–Civil War decades to the early 1940s. Current third, and dated at the state line where the record is firm: Indiana's Rural Electric Membership Corporation Act was signed March 9, 1935 — the first act of its kind in the nation — and the federal Rural Electrification Administration followed on May 11, 1935. The neighboring county shows the machinery working on the ground's own timescale: Marshall County REMC was incorporated May 19, 1936, set its first pole September 30, 1937, and lit its first member on April 30, 1938. For Clay and Harris themselves, the honest statement is narrower. No history of a St. Joseph County REMC was found in the searches run — the co-op's own record does not surface in open sources — and the ground's power today comes from an investor-owned utility, Indiana Michigan Power: the Tribune's Microsoft reporting states the data-center site will be served by American Electric Power, I&M's parent, not by NIPSCO. The two townships' first-pole and first-member dates are a named gap, settled, when it is settled, by the REMC and I&M predecessor records and the Purdue extension annual reports, and the Indiana Electric Cooperatives yearbooks at the Indiana State Library — not by borrowing Marshall County's dates and calling them this ground's.
Chapman (1880), p. 667 (river power developed and utilized); J. Sanford Rikoon, "The White Plains, Indiana, Threshing Ring, 1920–1943," Indiana Magazine of History (separator power sequence: horses, steam, gas c. 1925; ring organization); Indiana REMC Act signed March 9, 1935, and REA established May 11, 1935 (Indiana cooperative histories); Marshall County REMC 90th-anniversary history, Indiana Connection (incorporated May 19, 1936; first pole September 30, 1937; first member April 30, 1938); South Bend Tribune, February 2026 (Microsoft site served by American Electric Power); searches run November 2026 for a St. Joseph County REMC history returned no such history.