First courts, first jail, first officers — the county frame and the township's own

St. Joseph County's justice begins in a trader's house and a tavern room, and its first courthouse cost $3,000. The county was organized by act of 29 January 1830, effective 1 April 1830, out of Cass County; the first county seat stood at "St. Joseph," on William Brookfield's farm in German Township, and moved to South Bend on 7 September 1831. The first court met in 1831 at Alexis Coquillard's house, then at Calvin Lilley's hotel and tavern; the first courthouse — wood — was built in 1833 by Peter Johnson for $3,000. The denominated reference (Monks and Esarey, Courts and Lawyers of Indiana, vol. III, 1916) dates the machinery: the first Probate Court session sat 5 January 1832 before Associate Judges John Baker and William McCartney Sr., in a room at Lilley's tavern fitted up by Coquillard; the first elective Probate Judge, James P. Antrim, was commissioned 10 December 1832 and sat first on 11 February 1833; the county lay in the First Circuit (Judge John R. Porter) until its removal to the Eighth Circuit on 7 January 1833. The archive's own scope confirms the frame: Notre Dame's Saint Joseph County Records hold Circuit Court records from the October term of 1832, and the auditor's papers include the specifications for the 1844 jail and lists of sheriffs for 1842–44. Two limbs stand unreached and print as named residues: the first sheriff's name (no carrier reached names him; settler, the commissioners' record of 1830) and the first indictment (settler, the Circuit Court's first-term record). The township's own first officers stand banked and are cited, not re-dug: the April 1836 election at Earl's tavern chose John Henderson and Jacob Rector justices of the peace — Union Township's justice begins, like the county's, in a tavern.

Principal sources: Monks & Esarey, Courts and Lawyers of Indiana, vol. III (1916); the county-organization record as carried by the county and local-history carriers; the University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County Records (SJO) scope note; the banked this history lk-civ-servants for the township limb.