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Before 1830 – 1830s · Harris Prairie and the Clay strip
The frame, stated once for the whole band: this ground had founders on both sides of the settlement line, and this section does not pretend otherwise. The Indigenous founders — the Potawatomi and Miami leaders whose towns, trails and cessions cover this ground — stand in the Tribes leg of this build at full profile size, and are cross-referenced there, not re-profiled here. The settler founders stand below, at the strength the two county histories give them. Howard's 1907 history, read first-hand, opens the Harris Township roll in one sentence: the prairie and the township both took their name from Jacob Harris, who settled in 1830; in the same year or the year before came the Baldwins, David and Josephus; Samuel Bell came with his father-in-law, Jacob Harris; in 1830 came Adam Miller, a Baptist preacher, and Adam Ringle; and the other very early settlers were Joseph Buell, Henry Augustine, Jacob Meyer, a Mr. Hartzel, Robert Kennedy, David Ringle and his sons Samuel and Levi, Arbogast Zaehnle, W. and E. M. Irvin, and James Lowry. Chapman's 1880 history, written a generation closer to the events, refines several of those dates and contradicts two of them; the contradictions are printed whole in the entries below, not smoothed.
The documentary floor under the roll: the first entries of land in St. Joseph County were made on 19 April 1830, in Section 11, Township 38 North, Range 3 East — the section at Harris Prairie's heart — when John Johnston entered the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter and Samuel Bell the southeast quarter of the southwest quarter, forty acres each, on Chapman's "First Entries of Land" record. Bell stands in the settler roll below. Johnston does not appear among Howard's early settlers at all.
Named gap — John Johnston's forty:The settling sources are the county tract books and the deed record for Section 11, Township 38 North, Range 3 East. He is carried here, at the frame's strength, as the man whose name stands first in the county's land record and nowhere in its settler roll — the record's own silence, printed rather than filled.
Sources:
- Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), ch. V, §3 (Harris Township), quoted first-hand in this build's Before the City leg.
- History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880), "First Entries of Land" and the Harris Township chapter.
- This build's Tribes leg, where the Indigenous founders of this ground stand at profile size.