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The Land · ice, prairie, cession, and the farm map
Granger was never platted. No proprietor ever filed a town on this ground, no dedication ever gathered its lots into a corporation, and so its land record is not a plat book but the older and larger record underneath every plat in the county: a Potawatomi cession read as a transaction; a federal survey that ruled the two townships of the frame into sections against a state line run with wooden posts; a land office that opened in the spring of 1830 with its first entries on this ground itself; and then forty years of cash entries, school-section sales and road-grant selections that turned a prairie-and-barrens township into the complete farm map the county atlas could print in 1875. Under the farms the ground itself was already old paperwork of another kind — the stacked fan heads of two ice lobes, drift tens of metres thick, and a groundwater creek that still runs cold enough for trout through the subdivisions. What follows is that record, from the ice to the atlas.
The frame: three townships, one unincorporated ground
THE RECORD TO 2020
The starting title is stated plainly: before any paper title existed, this was Potawatomi country — the St. Joseph valley was Potawatomi ground, held by the bands whose villages stood along the river, and every later title on…
The ice that built the ground: the interlobate fans
THE WISCONSIN EPISODE — READ IN THE SURVEY RECORD
This ground was built where two lobes of the ice met: The Indiana Geological and Water Survey's account of the South Bend quadrangle (Antinao and Rupp, in the Indiana Journal of Earth Sciences ) lays the county's northeast in the…
Harris Prairie: the named opening in the barrens
1830 — 1831, IN THE SETTLERS' OWN RECORD
The ground had one famous opening, and the township took its name from the man who settled it: Chapman's county topography names the county's principal prairies in order — Terre Coupee, the largest; Sumption's; Portage; Harris…
Barrens, loam and muck: what the ground would grow
THE PERIOD RECORD, 1880 — THE MODERN SURVEY
The county's first soil account is a sentence long, and this ground holds three of its four soils: Chapman, passing "from township to township," distinguishes "the light, sandy soil of the original oak openings, the dark, sandy…
The taking, instrument by instrument: the cession of 1828
20 SEPTEMBER 1828
This ground's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey…
The treaties that did not touch this ground
1795 — 1833
Proximity is not cession, and the instruments that passed this ground by are named so that none is ever inflated into a taking: The Treaty of Greenville (1795) ceded the Ohio country and a schedule of reserved tracts about the…
The state as landowner: the road grant, the school section, the swamp lands
1826 — 1855
Not all the ceded ground passed through the land office; some of it was Indiana's from the start: The local equivalent of Fort Wayne's canal grant is the Michigan Road grant. By the second article of the 1826 treaty the…
The grid on this ground: meridian, state line, and the fractional tier
1816 — 1832
The ground was measured before it was sold: Northern Indiana is reckoned from the Second Principal Meridian, the north–south line from which the state's central and northern townships are counted, crossed by a base line in the…
Two civil townships carved out of one: Harris, then Clay
1835 — 1840
The congressional townships were surveyed wholes; the civil townships were cut to fit the settlement: Howard's history, working from the county board's orders, gives the sequence for this ground. A Washington Township was ordered…
Into market: the first entries in the county were made on this ground
SPRING 1830 — 1836 AND AFTER
Surveyed and ceded, the ground could be bought — and the county's market opened here: Chapman's county history states the opening plainly: "The lands in St. Joseph county, although ceded to the United States Government some years…
Juday Creek: the ground's own water
THE RECORD TO THE PRESENT
The frame has one creek, and the record for it is unusually exact: Juday Creek is a groundwater-fed, third-order tributary of the St. Joseph River (Shirey and others, 2016). The research record gives it a length of 19 kilometres…
The farm map of 1875: the ground as the atlas prints it
1875
Forty-five years after the first entries, the county atlas prints this township as a finished farm map: The Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) lays the Harris Township plat at its page…
Where the paper lives, and the map made private
1830 — THE PRESENT
This ground's land paper has always lived in South Bend, and the county built its archive deliberately: The county seat is six miles southwest of the frame, and the deeds, mortgages and school-land instruments of these townships…