The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Maps
Ten shortfalls from the depth audit, dug from open sources in November 2026. Where a search ran whole and found nothing, the negative is printed, not smoothed over. Where two sources disagree, both figures stand.
The river before the county: this ground on French and imperial maps, 1679–1763
No French sheet ever surveyed Clay or Harris Township. What the imperial record gives this ground is a river, a fort at its mouth, and a portage — drawn at continental scale, from other men's journals. The chain, checked against…
The first county map: Stokes and Shober, 1863 — verified
The audit's test case holds. The Library of Congress catalogue records Map of St. Joseph Co., Indiana , published at Philadelphia by M. W. Stokes in 1863 and “engraved, printed & mounted by Chas. Shober” — entered according to…
The atlas trade whole: subscription atlases and plat books, 1875 to the GIS age
The county atlas was a subscription business: canvassers sold the book farm by farm, and a family's portrait, residence view or patron's-directory line was part of what it bought. For this county the dated run, makers named from…
Bird's-eye views: a printed negative for the village and the two townships
Tested negative. The Library of Congress panoramic-map collection — the bird's-eye views of North American towns, 1847–1929, catalogued in the Geography and Map Division's panoramic checklist — was searched in November 2026 for…
The working map run: street sheets and county highway maps as a dated series
Street maps were working paper — folded in glove boxes, replaced as the streets grew — and the surviving run, assembled from the SJCPL map case and the Indiana State Library's county list, reads as one dated series. It opens…
The Sanborn run, measured: no Granger, and the county's fire-insurance geography
Tested negative for Granger. The Library of Congress Sanborn online checklist and the Indiana Sanborn inventory at Indiana University (the Indiana Spatial Data Portal set: 11,517 images, 305 Indiana locations, Sanborn's Indiana…
Plans as maps: the county drawn as it was meant to become
A comprehensive plan is a map of intentions, and the county's series can be read plan by plan. Its ancestor in the map case is the undated Land Use and Transportation Plan for South Bend, Mishawaka, and St. Joseph County , and…
Booster cartography: the map as advertisement
Every map in this section wants something, but the booster map wants it openly. The type specimen in the county list is the South Bend Association of Commerce's 1930 road sheet titled, as its whole argument, All Roads Lead to…
The national topographic record: the quadrangles that cover the CDP
The United States Geological Survey's 7.5-minute series covers the Granger CDP almost entirely with one sheet: South Bend East, Indiana (quadrangle 41086-F2), with the CDP's eastern strip in the Osceola quadrangle (41086-F1) and…
From the air: the aerial photographic record
The aerial record of this ground begins, as most American farmland's does, with the federal farm flights of the late 1930s. The USGS EROS Aerial Photography Single Frame collection — over 6.4 million frames from federal…
Searches shown
Library of Congress: item 2013593163 (Stokes/Shober 1863); panoramic collection searches for Granger / Clay Township / Harris Township (negative); Sanborn checklist search for Granger (negative). Indiana State Library: St. Joseph County maps, atlases and plat books list, read whole; Sanborn page. Indiana University: Sanborn archive and Wells index; ISDP 2005 orthophoto status. Illinois State Library USGS historical quadrangle inventory for Indiana, entries South Bend East / West and Osceola read in full. USGS: US Topo collars (2010, 2013); EROS single-frame collection record; WRIR 95-4135. St. Joseph County: 2002 Comprehensive Plan; 2021 comprehensive-plan RFP; APC R-267-24 adoption record (Oct 2024). SJCPL map-case finding aid, read whole. archive.org: 1875 Higgins, Belden atlas, full text and index.