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The Land · surveys, cessions, and the paper the town stands on
Before Mishawaka was a town it was paperwork. A Potawatomi cession signed at a mission on the river in 1828; a federal survey that ruled the ground into townships, sections and quarter-sections; a state line run with wooden posts in the fall of 1827; a school section — the one section in every township reserved for schools — sold by a county commissioner on the petition of the settlers themselves; and then, in five years, nine plat filings on two banks of a rapids, each with its proprietor's dedication, its surveyor's certificate and its acknowledgment, until the legislature gathered the paper towns into one. Every later fact of the city — its lots, its streets, its mill races, its deeds — descends from those instruments, and the originals of the system are still at work: the county surveyor is required by law, today, to keep a book of the original government survey corners and to check them, a few at a time, every year. What follows is the ground's paper record, from the survey to the plat books.
The frame: meridian, state line, and the survey of the township
1816 — 1832
The ground was measured before it was sold: Northern Indiana is reckoned from the Second Principal Meridian, the north–south line from which the state's central and northern townships are counted, crossed by a base line in the…
The cession as a transaction, and the reserve test
20 SEPTEMBER 1828
The townsite's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" …
Into market: the land office and the first entries
SPRING 1830 — 1833 AND AFTER
Surveyed land could be bought, and the county's land was bought fast: Chapman's county history states the opening plainly: "The lands in St. Joseph county, although ceded to the United States Government some years previous by the…
The school section: how the townsite was bought
1 JANUARY 1833
The townsite was not federal land at all — it was the schools' land, and the settlers petitioned for its sale: In every congressional township the rectangular survey reserved one section — Section 16 — for the support of schools…
Hurd's plat as an instrument
15 JULY 1833 — 23 OCTOBER 1835
The founding document of the city is a surveyor's description, and Howard prints it whole: Alanson M. Hurd's dedication of the village of St. Joseph Iron Works, signed 15 July 1833, describes a plat of fifty-two and seven-tenths…
The other instruments: Barbee, Indiana City, the Fowlers, Taylor
20 APRIL 1835 — 19 APRIL 1837
Four more proprietors put paper on the two banks, and each instrument survives in its surveyor's words: The first plat to carry the name Mishawaka was a rival's, not Hurd's. Its title is "Plat of the Town of Mishawaka," made by…
The addition system: the legal frame of a paper town
1833 — THE PRESENT
The plats were not plans; they were conveyancing machines, and their form never changed: Each founding instrument does the same legal work in the same order — a proprietor causes ground to be surveyed, dedicates the streets and…
The water-power ground: dam, races, and the reserved tract
1835 — 1881 AND AFTER
The town's second title system was written in water: The St. Joseph Iron Works' charter — the act approved 22 January 1835 constituting Hurd, John J. Deming, John H. Orr and their associates "the president, directors and company…
Where the paper lives: recorder, surveyor, and the archives
1830 — THE PRESENT
Mishawaka's land paper has always lived in South Bend, and the county built its archive deliberately: The county seat is four miles down the river, and the townsite's deeds, plats and mortgages were recorded there from the…
The Reserved Sections Accounted: School Lands, Swamp Lands, and the County Purchase
The plat this city grew from was not ordinary public land, and the land fragment tells why: the townsite was the school section — Section 16 of Penn Township, the section the federal survey reserved in every township for the…
The Speculation Era and Its Bust: The First Buyers Named
The boom that made Mishawaka was a paper boom laid over an iron furnace, and its first buyers have names. Alanson M. Hurd came from Detroit and built the blast furnace on the south bank in 1833, platting the town of St. Joseph…
The Closing State Line: What Remained Unalienated
A closing line for the land account — by a named date, the map is private — cannot be drawn from the record this build has reached, and this entry prints that plainly rather than borrowing a date. The school section's alienation…