The townsite the schoolchildren owned

1 JANUARY 1833 · BOUGHT ON THE SETTLERS' OWN PETITION

The purchase: The ground Mishawaka stands on was never the federal government's to sell. In every congressional township the rectangular survey reserved one section — Section 16 — for the support of schools, and Mishawaka's founding ground was that section: Hurd's plat, by its own dedication, was laid out in "school section number sixteen, township thirty-seven north of range number three east." Indiana sold its school lands through its own machinery, and Chapman's Penn Township history gives the transaction its fullest surviving form: "This land (being school land), where Mishawaka now stands, upon petition of the settlers to the School Commissioner, was purchased Jan. 1, 1833, by Mr. Hurd, who had promised to erect a blast furnace upon the site." The city's commissioned history prices it: the 640-acre section at $1.25 an acre, $800 in all — $1.25 being the era's standard minimum price, the floor the school trustees set division by division. The oddity is the whole mechanism: the settlers themselves petitioned to have their own schools' endowment sold out from under the township, a promoter bought the townsite for the price of a good farm, and the consideration he gave was a promise — a blast furnace — on which the town was in fact built. What the published record does not carry is the instrument itself: the commissioner's name, the deed's book and page, and whether the $800 took the whole section in one sale. The county's school-land records are the named settling source, and the gap stands printed in the Land section.

Sources: the Land section of this history — Chapman (1880), Penn Township, the purchase of 1 January 1833 on the settlers' petition, Hurd's promised blast furnace; the 1875 county atlas's five-word version ("bought the land where Mishawaka now stands, January 1, 1833, of the commissioner"); De Kever's price, 640 acres at $1.25, $800 in all; Howard (1907), Hurd's plat dedication naming school section sixteen; the instrument itself named there as the settling source not yet pulled.