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 68 — the sections ruled, the parcels named owner by owner — and the township's directory at pages 103 and 104. The directory is a patrons' list, not a tax duplicate: it names the farmers who subscribed, with each man's section, his business, his nativity and the year he settled in the county. Read as a pattern it is the entry wave of 1830–1836 completed. The Harris patrons stand by section across the township's middle — sections 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22 and 24 — and every business named is a farm business: Farmer; Produce Farmer; Stock Farm; Grain and Stock Farm; a grain-and-produce farm on Section 7; sheep-raising on Section 17. The settlement years reach back to the entry era itself — 1833 on Sections 14 and 22, 1834 on Section 11, the very section of the county's first entries, 1835 on Section 21 — and the nativities are the migration that filled the grid: Stark and Montgomery counties in Ohio, Columbia County in Pennsylvania, Sussex County in Delaware, Cass County in Michigan, Germany, France and Ireland, and by the 1840s St. Joseph County itself, the second generation farming Sections 11 and 22.

The directory carries one structural fact no plat could: Harris Township in 1875 had no village and no post office of its own. Its patrons take their mail at Edwardsburg, in Michigan — the Sections 9, 16 and 17 farms, across the state line — or at South Bend, Mishawaka or Elkhart. The ground that had opened the county's land market remained, at forty-five years, purely a farm township, its paper kept in other towns and even in another state; it is the land record of an unincorporated place, complete a century and a half before the Census Bureau drew a designated place around it. The plat page itself — its parcel-by-parcel names — must be read from the plate image; the directory is the text the atlas's publishers set in type, and the plate, at page 68 of the atlas as held by the Allen County Public Library and the archive.org scan, is named in this section's notes as the settling source for the farm map at parcel level.

Sources:

1. Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1875) — the Harris Township plat, page 68; the Harris Township directory, pages 103–104: the patrons by section (7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24), their farm businesses, post offices (Edwardsburg, Michigan; South Bend; Mishawaka; Elkhart), nativities and county-settlement years (1833 on Sections 14 and 22; 1834 on Section 11; 1835 on Section 21).