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1830
The township's first name is a settler's: "The prairie and the township both received their name from Jacob Harris, who settled in the township in 1830." Howard's sentence, read first-hand, is the founding document of the place. Harris did not come alone, and Howard names the company: David and Josephus Baldwin came the same year or the year previous; Samuel Bell came with his father-in-law, Jacob Harris himself; Adam Miller, a Baptist preacher, and Adam Ringle also arrived in 1830. The very early settlement that followed fills out in Howard's list — Joseph Buell, Henry Augustine, Jacob Meyer, Mr. Hartzell, Robert Kennedy, David Ringle and his sons Samuel and Levi, Arbogast Zaehnle, W. and E. M. Irvin, James Lowry. These are farm entries on prairie ground in a county itself only organized in 1830, in the southeast-then-northeast corner of it; there was no plat, no proprietor, no town company. Granger begins the way its government still runs — as a township of farms, named for the first man the county history credits with settling it.
Sources:
- Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1, ch. VIII, sec. 3, pp. 279–280, read first-hand.
- Kenneth E. Lindsay, Harris Township trustee, "Harris Township: History, and a Question," Granger Gazette, August 2020 — the township's own account, naming Jacob Harris "an early settler of marshy land including 'Harris Prairie.'"