Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880)

Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880 — read first-hand in the archive.org full text, with one table refused from every machine copy

What it is: the first full history of the county, and the base layer under this build's nineteenth century. The Granger passes read it in the Internet Archive copy (historyofstjosep00chap): chapter XIII, "Agriculture in St. Joseph County," whole; the Harris Township chapter whole; the Clay Township chapter whole, with the Union Township chapter consulted for contrast; and the "First Entries of Land" record that carries the ground's first takings — John Johnston and Samuel Bell, 19 April 1830, section 11, township 38 north, range 3 east, forty acres each, the Harris Prairie settlement party's own entries. From Chapman come the 1831 wheat, the settler rolls the People file works at full depth, and the convergence the Government file prints on the county's first sheriff.

Its standing, from this build's experience: for the townships' first fifty years Chapman is frequently the only connected account there is, and this history prints him as the carrier, not the verdict. His Harris Township acreage — 13,329 acres — stands in print against the Census Bureau's 21.12 square miles for the same township, unreconciled, because neither carrier yields to the other on the record reached.

Where it fails: at his own best table. Chapman's township-by-township products table for 1880 (pp. 664–665), drawn from the assessors' returns — the one printed township-level statistical table this ground has — survives only on the printed page: the machine copies interleave its columns past honest reconstruction. This build prints the table's existence and its provenance, takes no figure from it, and names the printed page images as its settling source (GAP-FARMS-1). The rule the failure taught is the build's: the page image is the source; the transcription is a convenience.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), read from the archive.org item named in the entry — chapters XIII, Harris, and Clay whole; the First Entries record.
2. granger-full/.