Where the paper lives, and the map made private

1830 — THE PRESENT

This ground's land paper has always lived in South Bend, and the county built its archive deliberately: The county seat is six miles southwest of the frame, and the deeds, mortgages and school-land instruments of these townships were recorded there from the beginning, in the office of the county recorder — an office joined at the county's start with the clerk's: Lathrop M. Taylor was elected the county's first clerk and recorder on 18 October 1830. The archive of the survey itself was assembled by order: at the November term of 1831 the Board of County Commissioners appointed William Clark county surveyor "and was ordered to procure certified copies from the Registers of different land offices where land had been sold; field notes of townships, ranges, sections, fractional sections, as originally surveyed, and deposit them in the Recorder's office of St. Joseph county, according to law" — the plural "Registers" matching the two-office market of the entry above. The federal originals stand apart: the survey plats and field notes and the La Porte–Winamac tract books in the state and federal archives, the compiled survey notes digitized from the National Archives, and the 1829 county field notes at the University of Notre Dame Archives. The living instrument of the system is the county surveyor's corner book: Indiana Code 36-2-12-11 requires the surveyor to keep the record of the original government survey corners and to perpetuate a share of them every year, and the state line's own posts, Kendrick's mile markers of 1827, are under re-monumentation by the Indiana–Michigan Boundary Line Commission of 2019.

The closing state of the ground can be dated. By 1836, on Chapman's account, about all the government land was taken up; the reserved categories — the school sections, the road selections — passed into private hands by the state's sales in the same decades; and by 1875 the atlas prints Harris Township as a wholly private farm map, section by section, patron by patron, with no public ground left in it but the roads and the creek. What the twentieth century added, and what the Census Bureau's designated place of 24.68 square miles now contains, stands on that map: subdivisions drawn inside the same sections, on titles that descend, entry by entry and sale by sale, from the cession of 1828 and the entries of 19 April 1830 in Section 11 — the first land the county ever sold, sold on the ground this section describes.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the November 1831 order to County Surveyor William Clark, quoted from the commissioners' record; Taylor as first clerk and recorder, elected 18 October 1830 (the county history carried in the 1875 atlas).
2. Indiana Code 36-2-12-11 — the county surveyor's corner record book, its contents, and the annual five-percent perpetuation of the original government survey corners.
3. Indiana's Indiana–Michigan Boundary Line Commission (2019) and the St. Joseph County Surveyor's boundary history, as reported in the South Bend press (2025) — the re-monumentation of Kendrick's 1827 mile posts.
4. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the tract books, field notes and plat maps at the State Archives; the compiled survey notes digitized from the National Archives; the LaPorte–Winamac index.
5. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO) — the early county records on microfilm, 1829–1865 in the bulk.