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Prairie, oak openings, timber and marsh — Penn Township at settlement, and the La Salle swamp's deep frame
The county mosaic: Howard's summary of the ground as the survey generation found it: the county's 477 square miles were "diversified by prairies, marshes, oak-openings and rolling timber lands. The oak-openings are covered with a light sandy soil, excellently suited to the raising of small fruits and vegetables. The timber lands possess a subsoil of clay, covered with a rich dark soil… The prairies, both old and young, for the marshes and beds of former lakes are but incipient prairies, have the richest and most productive soils." Levette's 1874 district account gives the proportions for the seven counties: about one-third of the surface in heavy timber — his list headed by beech, white oak and burr oak — "the remainder being either 'oak openings'… or prairies, with a few swamps and innumerable small lakes," the marshes carrying bog iron ore, peat and marl. The oak openings — the sparse white- and burr-oak savanna of the survey notes — are the signature surface of this valley's uplands in both accounts.
The township's marsh: Penn Township's own survey-era surface is carried at township strength by the county record the Farms & Crops leg reads: Chapman's great marsh ran from the St. Joseph river near South Bend southeast almost the whole length of Penn Township, three-quarters of a mile to two miles wide, with a cultivated "Island" of two to three hundred acres at its center; Howard identifies the same water as the La Salle swamp — the swamp behind which, the tradition he prints says, La Salle lost his way — the large marsh lying between Mishawaka and the hills to the south, extending almost from west to east of the township. Its deep frame is the glacial valley's own: this marsh is the undrained floor of the old Kankakee sand-plain on the township's south side, the six-mile-wide level valley of Montgomery's account where it passes east of the city. Montgomery's mechanism for such ground, printed in his account of the valley below South Bend, is carried here beside Chapman's marsh as the valley's shared explanation, at valley strength: where the old channel remained silted with no modern stream cut through it, spring waters escaping from beneath the moraines and from the old stream's bed itself "caused a vast growth of peat or muck over the entire valley proper," six to ten feet of it, over fine sand and river gravel below. The drained marsh's second life — the peppermint ground of the mint era, some thousand acres by the 1906 account Howard prints — belongs to Farms & Crops; what belongs here is that the mint grew in a glacial lake-plain's undrained floor.
The settlers' reading, printed as theirs: Chapman records what the township's own citizens made of their marsh: "The citizens of Penn regarded the marsh… as once an arm of Lake Michigan." The belief is printed here as the settlers' reading of their ground, not as the survey's: the geological record makes the marsh a silted glacial valley floor that never held lake water of Lake Michigan's basin, and the correction stands in the same paragraph as the belief, because the belief is itself evidence — of how lake-like the standing water of the old channel floor appeared to the people who had to drain it.
The survey itself: The federal survey that fixed this ground into sections — Penn Township is Township 37 North, Range 3 East of the survey grid the Land leg of this build works from — belongs to the county's first-surveys era, treated in Howard's land chapter, and it is to the Land leg that the transactions belong. The deputy surveyors' field notes, in which the lines were walked and the timber, water, swamp and soil called section by section, survive in the General Land Office records (Bureau of Land Management) and the Indiana Archives, which hold field notes and plats for the whole state. Those notes have not been pulled line by line for this section; the section-strength surface of Penn Township therefore stands open, and the notes are the named source that would settle it. What stands at print strength now is the period printed record above — Chapman's township marsh, Howard's identifications, and the two survey-era county frames.
Sources: Howard (1907), Chapter I, §VIII — the county mosaic, the oak-openings and timber-land soils, the prairie definition, and Chapter I generally for the La Salle swamp identification, with the 1906 peppermint account carried in the Farms & Crops leg; Levette (1874) — the district proportions, timber list and marsh products; Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the Penn Township marsh, the Island, and the citizens' arm-of-the-lake reading, as carried in the Farms & Crops leg; Howard (1907), Chapter I, §VII, sec. 3 — the peat-and-muck mechanism for the silted valley floor; Indiana Archives and Records Administration, land records — the survival and custody of the General Land Office field notes and plats for Indiana.