Two civil townships carved out of one: Harris, then Clay

1835 — 1840

The congressional townships were surveyed wholes; the civil townships were cut to fit the settlement: Howard's history, working from the county board's orders, gives the sequence for this ground. A Washington Township was ordered on 4 May 1835 for this territory and the order was canceled. On 5 January 1836 Harris Township was formed: beginning at the northwest corner of Section 8, Township 38 North, Range 3 East; running south to the southwest corner of Section 29; east to the county line; north to the state line; and back to the beginning — a boundary that omitted the south tier of sections proposed for Washington, and that took in, westward, the strip that is now Clay. On 5 May 1840 the board formed Clay Township, detaching from Harris, in Howard's phrase, "a section and a half in width, east and west, off the west side of Harris," and Harris was thereby "reduced to its present dimensions": its restated boundary begins at the northwest corner of fractional Section 10, Township 38 North, Range 3 East, runs south to the southwest corner of Section 27, east to the St. Joseph–Elkhart county line, and north to the state line. The civil map of the frame was thus finished in 1840, a decade after the land market opened: the first entries in the county, made in 1830 in what is now Harris, were made when the whole frame was undivided county ground.

Even the finished township's size is carried in two figures, and they are printed whole. Chapman's county history, in its table of the townships' areas, gives Harris Township 13,329 acres. The Census Bureau's present figure for the township is 21.12 square miles — 13,517 acres. The two disagree by 188 acres, near a full quarter-section and a half; neither is adjusted to the other, and the difference stands as the record leaves it — the nineteenth-century table computed from the civil boundaries as then administered, the modern figure from the Bureau's own measurement. The fine polygon of the 1836 and 1840 orders — which section lines the "section and a half" in fact followed — does not survive the digitized text of Howard at numeral strength; the orders themselves, in the commissioners' record, with the county surveyor's township maps, are the settling source, named in this section's notes.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), Harris Township — Washington Township ordered 4 May 1835 and canceled; Harris formed 5 January 1836, with the boundary calls from Section 8 to Section 29 to the county line and the state line; Clay formed 5 May 1840, "a section and a half in width, east and west, off the west side of Harris"; Harris "reduced to its present dimensions," its restated boundary from fractional Section 10 to Section 27.
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the county area table: Harris Township, 13,329 acres.
3. Harris Township, St. Joseph County — the township's published figure: total area 21.12 square miles (United States Census Bureau).