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1826–1832 · the founding road's origin
The road was bought before it was built, and the price was land. By Article 3 of the treaty of 16 October 1826 — the same instrument family whose cessions the land build plots — the Potawatomi ceded, in the text as the Marshall County history prints it verbatim: "a strip of land commencing at Lake Michigan and running thence to the Wabash river, 100 feet wide, for a road, and also one section of good land contiguous to the said road for each mile of the same, and also for each mile of a road from the termination thereof through Indianapolis to the Ohio river… And the general assembly shall have a right to locate the said road and to apply the said sections or the proceeds thereof to the making of the same." The hundred-foot strip runs, by the article's own terms, from Lake Michigan to the Wabash; south of the Wabash the grant is the sections-per-mile without an express strip, and the corridors file prints the text as it reads. Howard's roads chapter gives the road its measure in his own summary: "This road was to Indiana what the Erie canal was to the state of New York, what the Union Pacific was to the regions beyond the Rocky mountains." The state's road income prints in two official figures with two scopes, unmerged because their scopes differ: 69,152 acres for the right-of-way cession of 1826 (the Historical Bureau's Sycamore Row annotation, citing Ratified Indian Treaty 146) and 170,580 acres of Indian land granted for the road as a whole, whose sale produced the building fund — the marker text's "With proceeds from the sale of 170,580 acres of Indian land granted by the Federal Government, Indiana built its first north-south road. Surveyed 1829, passable by 1834, 'completed' in 1837, its cost was $242,000.00." The locating was contested groundwork: the Act of 24 January 1828 appointed John McDonald of Daviess County, Chester Elliott of Warrick County and John I. Neely of Gibson County to survey and mark the road from Lake Michigan to Indianapolis and select the harbour site; the harbour went to the mouth of Trail Creek (Michigan City), and of the two routes south surveyed — a direct La Porte and Kankakee-swamp line, and a line through South Bend thirty miles longer — the South Bend route was accepted (Gordon, Indiana Magazine of History). That choice is Lakeville's founding fact in embryo: the longer road through South Bend is the road that runs through this town. The opening specification for the northern end survives in the legislature's own words of 1832–3, quoted in the Marshall County history from the Acts of 1832: the road to be "'cut' and 'opened'" — "Cut and clear off said part of said road all logs, timber and underbrush, leaving no stump more than one foot above the level of the earth, and grub thirty feet wide in the center of said road." The contractors through the country immediately south of this town were Polk, Blair and Seering, with Robert Schroeder of Marshall County's North Township a superintendent; the verdict on the work there — "the merest pretext toward complying with the intent of the law," the road "practically impassable for much of the way," its mud holes "bridged over with poles and logs placed on cross logs" — is the Marshall reach's record, printed as correspondence for the Lakeville reach, not identity: the same contract country, the same marsh, one township line apart.
Principal sources: Treaty of 16 October 1826, Art. 3, as printed in McDonald, History of Marshall County (1908), p. 147 (first-hand); Indiana Historical Bureau marker texts (Michigan Road; Sycamore Row annotation) (official); Gordon, "Effects of the Michigan Road on Northern Indiana, 1830–1860," Indiana Magazine of History (scholarly).