The land office and the first sales

1833 and after

The La Porte office served this ground; the townsite's first entries are a named gap. The Indiana Archives and Records Administration, custodian of the office's own records, states the frame: an additional land office opened at La Porte in 1833, its district embracing all or part of twenty counties including St. Joseph; "the first sale of land in the new district took place on 12 August 1833"; the office was moved to Winamac in 1839 and closed on 31 January 1855, its unsold lands passing to Indianapolis. Before the district existed, a significant portion of its lands had been offered at the Fort Wayne and Crawfordsville offices, where some half-million acres were actually purchased — so any entry on this ground predating August 1833 would stand in those registers. Howard's narrative dates the office's opening to 1835; the conflict prints whole in the register, and the custodian's record governs the date. The La Porte–Winamac tract books survive, their entry records in the Indiana Digital Archives. The reached record bounds the question: the ground was ceded in September 1828 and proclaimed in January 1829; the township's first settlements came in 1833, the season the office opened; and its first townsite occupant in the record, William L. Earl, bought his forty acres privately from Jacob Rector in 1836 — which puts a Rector entry or selection on or beside the townsite before 1836 without naming its instrument. The tract books for Township 36 North, Range 2 East, read with the State's Michigan Road selection lists for the same sections, are the settler, and the extraction is assigned in the forward plan.