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On the record
The founding road of this ground is not the Michigan Road. The build's roads record tests that great road and acquits it for this ground: the Michigan Road reached South Bend and turned west to Michigan City, and never crossed Clay or Harris township. The founding road here is the Old Chicago Trail — the stage road whose Adams Road stage stop, a brick house still standing, Transportation carries at township-history strength — and the succession question is what surfaces that road and the grid around it wore, in what order, dated where the record allows. For the founding road and the grid, the reached record states the order without a chronology: roads began on petition, were worked by statute labor, were graveled, and were given hard surface "in the order of their traffic" — an order of surfacing, printed in the fragment, with no road-by-road dates attached. One road on this ground does carry dated surfaces, and it is the state road: State Road 23 stands gravel on the state commission maps and then as "a high type of driving surface" on the commission maps of 1939 and 1941, the two map years the ISHC series fixes for it — gravel to pavement inside two map editions, the only dated surface transition this record holds. Around those fixed points the wider succession can be coursed at state size: Indiana's highway system began in 1917 with five market roads assembled out of named auto trails (original State Road 1 on the Dixie Highway and Michigan Road south from the state line; original State Road 2 on the Lincoln Highway), and the numbered era then re-drew this ground's edges — SR 23 itself, the Toll Road across the top in 1956, U.S. 20 at the southern boundary — while the farm grid under county care followed the printed order (petition, statute labor, gravel, hard surface) road by road as traffic warranted. The chronology that would date each grid road's gravel and pavement years is a named gap, and its settlers are the ones the fragment itself names: the St. Joseph County Highway Department's annual reports, read against the full Indiana State Highway Commission map series, of which the 1939/1941 editions are the part already in the build. Until those reports are read, this article prints the order whole, the one dated transition whole, and the missing dates as missing.
Transportation ("Before the rails" — the Michigan Road and the Vistula Road coursed and acquitted for this ground; the Old Chicago Trail stage stop on Adams Road) and its grid and SR 23 articles (petition, statute labor, gravel, hard surface "in the order of their traffic"; SR 23 gravel to "a high type of driving surface" on the 1939/1941 commission maps); Indiana Transportation History, "The First Five State Roads, and the Auto Trails They Replaced" (1917 market roads; OSR 1 and OSR 2). Named-gap settlers: St. Joseph County Highway Department annual reports; full ISHC map series.