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 loam of the densely wooded regions, the decayed vegetable mold of the prairies, and the peat-beds of the marshes and natural meadows," and adds the working consequence: "There is a large percentage of silica in most of the soil, and wheat consequently has always been an abundant crop." On Granger's ground the openings' sand is the barrens country around Harris Prairie; the prairie's own mold is the opening itself; and the peat and muck lie in the lowland Howard assigns the township and in the closed depressions of the fan ground. The densely wooded loam is the fourth soil, standing south and west where the timber closed.

Against the prairie's reputation the record carries one settler's verdict on the barrens, and it is printed whole because the township's farming history is unintelligible without it. Hardman, in the same reminiscence: "the white and black oak barrens of Clay and Harris townships were hardly worth buying from the Government; that three or four crops would exhaust the soil, and the land become worthless; and the first few years of cultivation did seem to have that effect, but the introduction and use of land plaster and cultivation of clover has not only restored these lands to their original fertility, but… made them better." The verdict covers the two townships of the Census Bureau's present frame together — Clay and Harris, the barrens belt along the state line — and its second half is the point: the ground was redeemed by amendment and rotation, gypsum and clover, and the farms of the 1875 atlas stand on soils their first cultivators had watched fail.

The modern survey maps the same ground in the survey's own pattern language. The published Soil Survey of St. Joseph County, Indiana (the federal survey whose data the national SSURGO database carries for this county as survey area IN141) lays the rolling moraine-and-fan ground of the county's northeast in the Riddles–Crosier–Oshtemo and Morley–Blount–Riddles associations, the sandy fan skirts and outwash in Tracy–Hillsdale–Tyner, and the closed wet depressions in the muck association, Houghton–Adrian–Henrietta. Its map units on this ground run to the Hillsdale sandy loams — at one to five percent slopes on the fan surfaces, and, with Oshtemo and Tracy, at five to eighteen percent on the fan heads, eroded phases named as such — the glacial frame of the ice entry expressing itself, slope by slope, as soil. A first federal soil map of the county had been made a working lifetime earlier: the county soil map surveyed in 1938 under H. P. Ulrich, at two inches to the mile, survives in the Indiana University map collection. The wet ground of the muck association is the ground the drainage record took up — ditches and tile under the county's drainage law, with Juday Creek itself held as a legal open drain, as its own entry tells; the county surveyor's regulated-drain map, which names this ground's lateral drains, is named in this section's notes as the settling source for the drainage pattern at section level.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the topography's four soils and the silica-and-wheat sentence; and the Hardman reminiscence: the barrens of Clay and Harris townships "hardly worth buying from the Government," the three-or-four-crop exhaustion, and the restoration by land plaster and clover.
2. Soil Survey of St. Joseph County, Indiana (United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service; SSURGO survey area IN141) — the general soil associations of the county's northeast (Riddles–Crosier–Oshtemo; Morley–Blount–Riddles; Tracy–Hillsdale–Tyner; Houghton–Adrian–Henrietta), as the survey's pattern diagrams present them (via the University of California, Davis, Soil Data Explorer), and the Hillsdale sandy loam map units of the fan ground.
3. Soil map, St. Joseph County, Indiana, surveyed 1938, H. P. Ulrich, cartographer (record in the University of California, Berkeley, GeoData collection, from the Indiana University copy) — scale 1:31,680.