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 Potawatomi granted a strip one hundred feet wide for a road from Lake Michigan to the Wabash, "and also a quantity of good land, contiguous to the said road, equal to one section for each mile of the said road," with the like quantity for the road's continuation toward the Ohio River; by the act of 2 March 1827 Congress granted the land to Indiana. The state took its mile-sections by selection along the road and sold them to build it. Through St. Joseph County the road itself ran west of this ground — in at Township 35 North, Range 2 East, and out at Section 34, Township 38 North, Range 1 West, on Chapman's "First Road" account as carried in the Mishawaka record — but a road selection stands at this frame's very corner: a South Bend abstract of title recites Section 1, Township 37 North, Range 2 East — the section immediately south of Clay's southeast corner, on the range line below Harris — among the Michigan Road lands selected by the State, confirmed by the act of 2 March 1831, the United States patent to Indiana dated 14 August 1835 (Deed Record 154, page 187). The state was thus a landowner at the frame's southwest doorstep a decade before Clay Township existed; no Michigan Road selection on the two townships of the frame themselves appears in any source reached, and the state's selection records are the settling source, named in this section's notes.

The school section is the second reservation, and on this ground it can be followed to the farm map. In every congressional township the rectangular survey reserved Section 16 for the support of schools, and the reservation passed to the state, not to the land office — the machinery of its sale by state and county school officers is the Mishawaka record's school-section entry, and it governed here in the same form. What the record shows for Harris's Section 16 is its end state: in the 1875 county atlas's directory the section is in farms like every other — a stock farm, and two produce farms, are listed on it by their patrons' names — the schools' section alienated into the same private map as the entered sections around it. The instruments of that alienation for these townships — the trustees' lot divisions, the sale dates and prices — stand in the township school-land records and are named in this section's notes; no source reached prints them.

The third state category is accounted for at the size the record allows. By the federal Swamp Land Act of 1850 the unappropriated swamp and overflowed lands passed to the states for reclamation by drainage, and Indiana made its selections county by county. This ground held the candidate acres — Harris's "large area of lowland" in Howard's account, the peat-beds of Chapman's topography, the muck depressions the modern survey maps — but which sections of these townships were selected as swamp land is not stated in any source reached for this section. The gap is named, not filled: the settling source is the state's swamp-land selection record and the county commissioners' proceedings, and the drainage entry in the soils article above carries the wet ground's farm history at the strength the record gives it. Of a purchase of ground in these townships by the county itself, the county histories read for this section record none; the county's own ground — courthouse, jail, poor farm — stands in other townships' records.

Sources:

1. Treaty with the Potawatomi, 16 October 1826, 7 Stat. 295, Article 2 (Kappler, Vol. II) — the hundred-foot strip and the section-per-mile grant; act of 2 March 1827, granting the land to Indiana.
2. Abstract of title for a South Bend addition (City of South Bend document record) — Section 1, Township 37 North, Range 2 East among the Michigan Road selections, confirmed by the act of 2 March 1831; United States patent to Indiana, 14 August 1835, recorded in Deed Record 154, page 187.
3. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "First Road," as carried in the Mishawaka record — the Michigan Road's course through the county, in at Township 35 North, Range 2 East and out at Section 34, Township 38 North, Range 1 West.
4. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the state's reserved school section in each township and its passage outside the federal land-office system.
5. Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1875), Harris Township directory — the farms listed on Section 16.