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1954 TO NOVEMBER 2026
The Indiana Toll Road's relation to this frame is exact, and it is not the relation the map suggests at a glance. The road — 156.28 miles, the Indiana East–West Toll Road, signed I-90 throughout and I-80 east of Lake Station — crosses the frame's whole width on its northern tier, through Clay Township and Harris Township in succession, on the northernmost of the four alignments the Toll Road Commission studied, crossing both of the frame's townships inside the census polygon between the South Bend interchanges and the Elkhart line. Construction of the $280-million road began on 21 September 1954; the Commission's own 1955 report illustrates the start of work "at Sycamore Road in St. Joseph County," one township west of this frame. The road opened in stages, east to west, and the stage that carried this ground was the first: the half from the Ohio line to U.S. 31 outside Roseland, north of South Bend, opened 16 August 1956. The formal dedication followed on 17 September 1956, and the road was completed 15 November 1956. Granger's ground thus had a limited-access superhighway across its northern tier from the road's first month — and, for twenty-six years, no way onto it.
The interchange record is the point. The original road served this part of the county from Exit 77 at South Bend (U.S. 31, by Roseland) and Exit 92 at Elkhart (SR 19) — both of them other places' doors — and its sequential exit numbers (converted to mileage-based numbering in 1981) skipped this ground entirely. The door came in the 1980s: Exit 83, in Harris Township at milepost 82.64, SR 331 (Capital Avenue) "to SR 23 — Mishawaka, Granger," opened 17 November 1982, with Mishawaka's mayor, Maggie Prickett, the first motorist onto the road at the new interchange. Capital Avenue — SR 331's northward run from Mishawaka — is the ramp's feeder, meeting SR 23 inside the frame at the junction the state-road entry records, so that the place's Toll Road access runs through its own southwest corner on its own roads. The road's modern administration passes at pointer size: the Toll Road Commission ran it to 1981, the state thereafter, and since 2006 the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company under the state's lease — the fact that touches this ground least of any in this entry. What touches it daily is simpler: the road the frame can see and hear from its northern subdivisions, entered at a Harris Township interchange that a generation of its residents did without.
Sources: Indiana Toll Road Commission, Annual Report (1 February 1955), full text (construction begun 21 September 1954; the Sycamore Road photograph caption; scheduled completion 15 November 1956); the Toll Road's documented history and exit record (staged openings east to west, August–November 1956; the first half, Ohio line to U.S. 31 outside Roseland, opened 16 August 1956; dedication 17 September 1956; exit numbering converted 1981; Exit 83, Harris Township, milepost 82.64, opened 17 November 1982, Mayor Prickett first motorist).