1831: the Eatons on sections 25 and 26 — the section's first named family

Howard (1907), Vol. 2, sketch of Edwin Douglass Eaton, p. 1070, read from the page-image text; Chapman (1880), Jacob Eaton sketch, pp. 679–680, read.

The first family any carrier places on this section arrived in 1831 and stayed five years. Howard prints it in the sketch of the family's third generation: Jacob Eaton's parents "came to Clay township, St. Joseph county, Indiana, in the year 1831. They first located on the present site of St. Mary's Academy, on sections 25 and 26, living there with people who had a lease on the property. Five years later they took up their abode on sections 16 and 17," where Isaac Eaton entered eighty acres. Chapman, writing a generation earlier, converges on everything but the first location: his Jacob Eaton sketch has the parents, Isaac and Margaret (Metzger) Eaton, arriving in September 1831, first settling in Clay Township, and afterwards "entering land on sec. 17" — the only named land entry tied to this section's story in any carrier read. Read together, the two histories give the section its first household: a settler family living on the sections 25–26 ground at the St. Mary's Academy site — the section's river-side end, a named ground of its own — on someone else's lease, the lease-holders unnamed in the sketch, before removing to their own entry five years later. The family is printed at exactly that strength: residents of the section in 1831–1836, at its academy-site end; no carrier places them on the quarter where the town now stands, and none is made to. One conflict in the family's record is carried unmerged's note: Chapman prints Isaac Eaton's death as 25 December 1860, Howard as 25 December 1869, the day and month agreeing and the year not.