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The Vistula's surfaces succeed one another in the record as follows. First, the trace itself: a Native trail along the river's south bank, the course the corridors fragment draws from the treaties and the first surveys. Second, the surveyed road: the National Register nomination for South Bend's Lincoln Way East Historic District — the federal record for the road's western reach — dates surveys of the road to the 1830s, with resurveys in the 1870s, and describes the road through those decades as the primary link between South Bend and Mishawaka, which is to say a graded dirt road of the ordinary Indiana kind, mud in the wet seasons of every traveler's complaint. Third, the hard surface: the same nomination states that by 1895 the road "was reconstructed by grading and brick paving," with a streetcar line established between South Bend and Mishawaka down the center of Vistula Avenue — the succession's dated hinge, brick and rail arriving together. Brick is the road's documented nineteenth-century pavement, and a piece of it survives in place: Ottawa Court, off the avenue in South Bend's district, is paved with brick still and stands as a contributing structure in the Register district. Fourth, the named-highway era's surfaces: the Lincoln Highway took the road in 1913, and the Elkhart County course of the same highway was paved in brick and concrete by 1924, the Indiana Humanities auto-tour record states — the Mishawaka reach's own paving contracts stand in the city's records and are not opened here; the modern Lincolnway is asphalt over the older work. The plank stage is the entry's honest absence. Indiana's plank-road fever was real — the General Assembly had chartered more than thirty plank companies by 1851, and the form's local instances are documented: the Logansport and Rochester Michigan Road Company, chartered 15 January 1846, planked its road about 1852 with two-inch boards spiked to stringers, and a company organized in the 1850s to build a plank road from Michigan City to South Bend failed outright, as Packard's 1876 history of La Porte County records. But no plank company for the Vistula line — South Bend to Mishawaka to Elkhart — appears in the record reached, and the succession prints the stage as skipped: the founding road went from dirt to brick in 1895 without a plank decade between. The checklist's full ladder — plank, then gravel, then pavement — is the form's ladder, not this road's; this road's ladder, dated from its own records, is trace, survey, brick, highway.