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, in Harris township; and Palmer's. Howard's county history states the naming directly: "The prairie and the township both received their name from Jacob Harris," who settled on it in 1830; Samuel Bell, his son-in-law, came with him, and David and Josephus Baldwin the same year or the year before. Harris Prairie was the ground's center before there was a farm map: an upland opening in the oak country, with the township's large area of lowland — Howard's words again — lying in the same township beside it.

The prairie survives in one eyewitness description, and it is printed at its full size. Dr. Jacob Hardman's reminiscence, carried in Chapman's history, tells that his family came in November 1830 and in the spring of 1831 moved "down to Harris's prairie," intending to enter land there but unable to raise the money to enter eighty acres — the cash terms of the federal market, met on the ground, in this section's market entry below. Jacob Harris, Hardman says, was the first settler on the prairie. Of the place itself: it was "nearly a mile in diameter, almost round, and surrounded by burr-oak and hickory bushes. It was a perfect gem in beauty and fertility." A crop of corn was put in on it in the spring of 1831. Howard, writing a generation later, calls the prairie ground "one of the finest upland prairies in the county." The ring of burr oak and hickory around the opening is the township's timber record in miniature: the prairie was an island, and the woods stood around it — the oak openings and barrens of the soils entry that follows, and behind them the densely wooded ground whose dark sandy loam Chapman distinguishes from the openings' light sand. The survey that preceded all of this had read the same landscape onto paper: the field notes of the county survey of 1829, surviving in an 1858 copy at the University of Notre Dame Archives, describe the county's landscape as surveyed — its vegetation, swamps, creeks and prairies — and are the settling source for this ground's timber and marsh at section level, named in this section's notes.

The prairie's name is still on the ground. Harris Prairie Cemetery, on Adams Road along the township's north side, carries it — the one place where the opening's name survives as a name, the prairie itself long since sectioned into the farms of the atlas entry below.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the topography's roll of the county's principal prairies (Terre Coupee, Sumption's, Portage, Harris, Palmer's); and the Hardman reminiscence: the family's arrival in November 1830, the move to Harris's prairie in the spring of 1831, the eighty acres they could not raise the money to enter, Jacob Harris as the prairie's first settler, the prairie "nearly a mile in diameter, almost round," its burr-oak and hickory ring, and the corn of 1831.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), Harris Township — Jacob Harris's settling in 1830, Samuel Bell and the Baldwins with or before him, the prairie and township named from him, "one of the finest upland prairies in the county," and the township's large area of lowland.
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO), MSJO 1 — field notes of a survey of St. Joseph County made in 1829 (1858 copy), describing the landscape, vegetation, swamps, creeks and prairies.
4. Harris Township's published township record — Harris Prairie Cemetery on Adams Road.