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 south of the state. Under that system this frame is the thirty-eighth tier of six-mile townships north of the base line — Harris in Range 3 East, Clay in Range 2 East — and the county's creating act of 29 January 1830 itself describes St. Joseph County in the system's language, running from Range 2 West of the meridian east to where Range 3 East intersects the state line, and thirty miles south. Inside each township the survey divided the land into thirty-six sections of 640 acres, and the sections into quarters and quarter-quarters; every deed, plat and farm description on this ground since reads in those terms.

The tier is not a full tier, and the record says so in its own word: fractional. The state's northern boundary — the line ten miles north of Lake Michigan's southern extreme set by the enabling act of 19 April 1816, and run on the ground by Eleazer P. Kendrick in October 1827 from William Harris's corner of June 1817, a wooden post at every mile to the 105th mile — cuts the thirty-eighth tier short, so that its northern sections are fractions of sections, closing on the line. Howard's history uses the survey's phrase for the township west of Clay: "congressional fractional township thirty-eight north, range two east"; the condition belongs to the whole tier, and it is written into this frame's own civil boundaries, which begin, in the commissioners' orders, at the northwest corner of "fractional section 10" and "fractional section" corners along the line. The deputy surveyors who laid out the county's townships between 1827 and 1832 were instructed, the county surveyor's boundary history records, to measure from their own lines to Kendrick's nearest mile post — the line is the frame every section in these townships still closes on, and its posts are still being re-monumented under the state boundary commission of 2019, as the closing entry tells. Who held the chain in Townships 38 North, Ranges 2 and 3 East, the sources reached for this section do not name; the townships' own survey plats, carrying their deputy surveyors' certificates, stand in the General Land Office records and are named in this section's notes as the settling source.

Sources:

1. Report of the survey of the northern boundary line of Indiana, transmitted 5 January 1835 (Serial Set 268), and E. P. Kendrick's field notes of 1827 — the enabling act of 19 April 1816, the act of 2 March 1827, Harris's corner of June 1817, the mile posts to the 105th mile, as carried in the Mishawaka record.
2. St. Joseph County Surveyor's office, history of the boundary (as reported in the South Bend press, 2025) — the township deputy surveyors of 1827–1832 instructed to measure to Kendrick's nearest mile post; the 2019 boundary commission's re-monumentation.
3. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907) — "congressional fractional township thirty-eight north, range two east" (German Township), and the Harris Township boundary orders' "fractional section 10."
4. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the rectangular system in Indiana, the meridian-and-baseline frame, the survey-then-sale sequence.