The stage stop on Adams Road

THE OLD CHICAGO TRAIL

Before the railroad, the road: the township's own history, as the trustee's newsletter carries it from Germaine Goff's 1980 History of Harris Township, places a stagecoach stop of the Old Chicago Trail — the road that ran between Chicago and Detroit across the top of Indiana — at a brick house on Adams Road, across from what is now the Covington Shores subdivision. The same address carries the place's most evocative documented layer: in the mid-1800s, in that still-standing brick home, Father Edward Sorin and a Father Granger are remembered to have held Mass for the farm families of the township, decades before any church stood here. The record gives the priest's surname as it gives it, and the Story of Granger section prints it without building on it: no source reached connects the name of this place to that priest, and the naming tradition the record does carry is stated in its own entry below. The stage stop matters on its own terms — it fixes the township on a through-route in the wagon era, and it explains the Adams Road corridor, along which the place's oldest surviving domestic architecture and, a century and a half later, its township hall, fire station, and farmers market all stand.

Sources:

1. Lindsay, "Harris Township: History, and a Question," Granger Gazette, August 2020, drawing on Germaine Goff, The History of Harris Township (1980).