The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The ground's dimensions
Two hundred feet of drift over shale, a clay plain under the town, and a moraine belt on the county's western rim. Howard reckoned the county's drift "will probably average two hundred feet", the only piercing to rock in his day at South Bend, 160 feet of drift in the river valley. The state compilations (IDNR bedrock-aquifer work, 1987–1994) give the unconsolidated deposits at 150 feet thick in the northeast and west to over 300 feet in the northwest, completely covering the bedrock — the only bedrock units beneath being the Ellsworth and Antrim shales. The USGS's northeastern-county study (WRI 95-4041, 1995; Union Township lies outside its map area, and prints as the county-frame statement it is) adds the pattern this ground sits in: south of the St. Joseph River, sand and gravel diminish and clay-rich deposits dominate. Howard's own surface division agrees: over about half the county the drift is a gravel outwash plain, but the southeastern part of the county is a till, or clay, plain — and Union Township and Lakeville stand in that till-plain country, ice-laid clay-rich ground, heavy, wet and slow to drain, which is the physical premise of everything the township's later drainage history does. On the county's western side runs the named moraine system nearest this ground, the Maxinkuckee Moraine — crescent-shaped, some 30–40 miles across western Marshall County and portions of western St. Joseph and Fulton counties, its aquifer system thin intratill sands within thick till. Its attribution prints whole as a conflict: the Lake Maxinkuckee Watershed Plan, citing Wayne (1966), says the moraine formed when the "Huron-Saginaw Lobe" stalled on its last retreat — a compound name that matches neither Howard's three distinct lobes nor the 2024 framework's separate actors. The disagreement is terminological; the process all sources agree on — a stillstand of retreating ice stacking till into a ridge belt along the county's west — stands.