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 south of the state. Under that system the future townsite lay in Township 37 North, Range 3 East — the thirty-seventh tier of six-mile townships north of the base line, the third range east of the meridian — and the county's own creating act of 29 January 1830 describes St. Joseph County in the system's language, running from Range 2 West of the meridian east to where Range 3 East intersects the state line, and thirty miles south. Inside the township the survey divided the land into thirty-six sections of 640 acres, and the sections into quarters and fractions; the town plats of 1833–1837 would be drawn, every one of them, inside that grid, on parts of Sections 9, 10, 15 and 16, and their surveyors' descriptions still read in its terms.

The township's northern bound was fixed before the township was surveyed. The act of Congress of 19 April 1816 that enabled Indiana's statehood set the state's northern boundary as an east-and-west line through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, and by an act of 2 March 1827 Congress authorized the President to have that line ascertained and marked. Surveyor General Edward Tiffin, at Chillicothe, Ohio, gave the contract to his deputy Eleazer P. Kendrick. Kendrick's field notes open on 8 October 1827 at the lake's southern extremity — at a corner set by William Harris in June 1817, witnessed by two aspen trees — and run east from a point ten miles north of it, setting a wooden post at every mile; the posts ran to the 105th mile, and Tiffin certified the plat of the line on 24 November 1827. The history of the boundary posted by the St. Joseph County Surveyor's office records the working connection between that line and everything surveyed after it: the federal deputy surveyors who laid out the county's townships between 1827 and 1832 were instructed to measure from their own lines to Kendrick's nearest mile post. The line Kendrick ran is the line the townships close on; its posts are still being looked for, as the closing entry of this section tells.

Who held the chain in Township 37 North, the sources reached do not name: the township's own survey plat, which carries its deputy surveyor's certificate, stands in the General Land Office records and is named in this section's notes as the settling source. What the county's histories do name is the survey's local establishment. Chapman (1880) records that William Brookfield, who settled in German Township about 1829 and laid out the first county seat on his own farm, was "at that time the surveyor of all the Government land throughout this community." In the western part of the county, Chapman's Olive Township account names another crew: "This part of Indiana was surveyed in 1830 by William and Noah Brock, the latter running the base lines, and the former dividing the land into sections." And in Penn Township itself the survey was work a settler could join: Nathan W. Young, one of the township's first settlers, "preempted land when the surveyors were at work here, and also carried chain for the Government surveyors" (Chapman). A field survey of the county made in 1829 survives — its field notes, in an 1858 copy, describing the landscape, vegetation, swamps, creeks and prairies, are held on microfilm in the University of Notre Dame Archives among the Saint Joseph County Records. The survey was the town's first document, and on this ground it was finished by the spring of 1830, when the land came into market — the subject of the third entry below.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the rectangular system in Indiana, the meridian-and-baseline frame, the survey-then-sale sequence, and the state's reserved school section in each township.
2. Act of 29 January 1830 creating St. Joseph County — the boundary description from Range 2 West of the Second Principal Meridian to Range 3 East at the state line, as printed in the county histories (see the Story of Mishawaka section's sources).
3. Report of the survey of the northern boundary line of Indiana, transmitted 5 January 1835 (Serial Set 268) — the act of 2 March 1827, Tiffin's letter of 24 November 1827 certifying the line as surveyed, and the General Land Office letter of 12 April 1827 directing it.
4. E. P. Kendrick's Survey Field Notes of the North Line of Indiana, 1827 (facsimile at the Indiana State Library; transcription by John McNamara, St. Joseph County Surveyor) — the notes opening 8 October 1827 at Harris's 1817 corner, the traverse to the ten-mile point, the mile posts east.
5. St. Joseph County Surveyor's office, history of the boundary (as reported in the South Bend press, 2025) — the township deputy surveyors of 1827–1832 instructed to measure to Kendrick's nearest mile post.
6. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — German Township: Brookfield "the surveyor of all the Government land throughout this community"; Olive Township: the Brocks' survey of 1830; Penn Township: Nathan W. Young carrying chain.
7. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO), MSJO 1 — field notes of a survey of St. Joseph County made in 1829 (1858 copy), on microfilm.