The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1834–1835, and the street course today
Chief credit, says Howard, belongs to one man — and the county section was finished in 1834 and 1835. Howard's roads chapter (Vol. 1, Ch. VI §II — the Contents' own placement, first-hand, correcting the chapter numeral this build's earlier note carried; DELTA-LK5-4): "Chief credit for the completion of the road through this county and on to the terminus at Michigan City is due to the commissioner then in charge, Judge William Polke, who was one of the most eminent of our public men in the early history of our county." The Marshall County history independently carries William Polke as Michigan road commissioner, entering land on the road in Fulton County in 1832, building "the first house on the road north of the Wabash," and making it his official headquarters. Howard's course for the road, in his own order, is the town's place in it: "The road runs almost in a direct line from the crossing of the Wabash at Logansport to the southern bend of the St. Joseph, passing through Plymouth, Lakeville and South Bend, all then within the limits of St. Joseph county" — Marshall County not yet organised when the road was built — "From South Bend the course turned to the west, so as to reach Michigan City by the most direct route… This section of the road was finished in 1834 and 1835; and its completion gave a wonderful impetus to the settlement of this county." The county section's 1834–35 finish sits beside the marker's statewide "passable by 1834, 'completed' in 1837" without conflict: county section against whole road. Howard expressly defers the road's earliest particulars to his Chapter V, "in connection with the first surveys of the public lands" — that passage was not read and stands as a named gap (gap G-RD-3), as do the road-land sales and scrip as they touched Union Township parcels (gap G-RD-2; the land build owns the office machinery).
Through town, the course is the banked frame at its carriers' strengths: the old road is Michigan Street, SR 931 today, and its hundred-foot right-of-way is "still legible in the town's width" — corroborated by the corridor surveyor's field record (a 1911-postmarked postcard of the road in Lakeville, "a wide road even then… because this is the old Michigan Road… and it had a 100-foot right of way"). At the north edge stand Patterson Street and State Road 4, in the town's own framing of its principal streets; whether Patterson Street is the in-town name of the SR 4 alignment or a parallel street was not settled by a carrier reached (gap G-RD-4, with the name's origin). South of town, one realignment fossil survives: Quinn Trail, on the town's south side, which "probably used to be US 31, based on how it could flow from and then back into current US 31, and how there's a curve at the south end that lets this segment meet US 31 squarely… this hasn't been US 31 in a long time" — the surveyor's own hedge ("probably") kept, the realignment's date unreached (gap G-RD-5). Just beyond the county line the road's oldest path parts from the numbered one briefly at Pleasant Lake (the same survey, Marshall County ground, boundary size).
Principal sources: Howard (1907), Vol. 1, Ch. VI §II §3 (first-hand transcription, the carrier's AI-generated-text caveat standing); McDonald (1908); Grey, Down the Road, Lakeville survey (enthusiast field record, strengths labelled in the text).