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1867 OR 1870 — THE CONFLICT PRINTED
The largest single fact of the nineteenth-century township was a farm that fed a university: Father Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame, assembled some 1,300 acres in the township for the Congregation of Holy Cross, and on that ground — St. Joseph's Farm, on Cleveland Road between Bittersweet Road and the railroad tracks — Holy Cross brothers and sisters raised the livestock and grew the crops that supplied the university. The dating conflict is printed whole because the place's own records carry both figures: the township history, through Goff, dates Sorin's acquisition of the 1,300 acres to 1867, and the parish's own strategic plan repeats 1867 for the farm's founding; the diocesan paper's accounts date the farm community to 1870 — "founded in 1870 by Father Edward Sorin." The Story of Granger section does not harmonize them. What is not in conflict is the course: a working religious farm of thirteen hundred acres, run by brothers and sisters, anchoring the township's Catholic life for a century — the farm's chapel community is the direct ancestor of the parish in the entry below, and the farm's ground is the direct ancestor of the campus in the closing entries, where the same acreage returns under a new owner. A solar farm rose on part of the ground in the 2020s, noted here at pointer size; the farm's whole record belongs to the Land and Religion sections.
Sources:
- Lindsay, Granger Gazette, August 2020 (the 1867 acquisition, via Goff 1980; the farm's situation on Cleveland Road).
- Saint Pius X Parish, Strategic Plan 2019–2024 (parish's own history: "1867 Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C. founded Saint Joseph's Farm in Granger, Indiana").
- Today's Catholic (Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend), 2014–2017 — the diocesan dating of the farm community to 1870.