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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 William Barbee and Henry Harman on 2 April 1835 and acknowledged 20 April 1835 as the "Town Plat of Mishawaka," by the proprietors, "William Barbee and Henry Harman, by William Barbee as Agent." Bray surveyed this one too, and his description lays it in federal ground east of the school section: "Laid out by William Barbee and Henry Harman on the 20th day of April, 1835, on a part of the northwest fractional quarter of section fifteen, in township thirty-seven north, and in range three east (2 Mer.), and on a part of the northwest quarter of the southwest quarter of the same section. The beginning point of this plat is the quarter section corner on the line dividing sections fifteen and sixteen" — the survey's corner between the federal section and the school section is the plat's own point of beginning. Howard reads the instrument as an independent town, not an addition — "it does not appear to have been intended as an addition, but rather as an independent town. The name of the St. Joseph Iron Works nowhere appears, although the Barbee plat adjoins the 'Original Town' on the east" — while Chapman, forty-five years earlier, had called it simply an addition "to the east side of the village." The two county histories divide on the paper's intent, and the division is printed here as it stands; the instrument itself, which names its own town and no other, is the weight on Howard's side of the scale, and no ruling is made beyond that.
Across the river, Indiana City was the largest paper of the founding generation: acknowledged 28 June 1836 by Joseph Battell, James R. Lawrence and Grove Lawrence, "laid out on the south half of section number nine and the northwest fraction of section sixteen, in township thirty-seven north, in range three east" — a full half-section of federal land joined to the school section's river fraction, so that this plat, alone of the rivals, stood on both kinds of title at once. Its internal reservations are carried in the water-power entry below and in Neighborhoods: a vacant tract between Joseph Street and the river marked "Reserved for water power," with a mill race drawn along the north bank, and two large squares set apart for public purposes, one marked "College Green" and the other "Court House Square" — the paper ambitions of a town that expected to be a seat of learning and of justice, neither of which was ever built upon them.
The Fowler papers are three. "Fowler's Addition to Mishawaka" was acknowledged 22 April 1836 by "George W. R. Fowler, the proprietor of the above mentioned and described village," and its surveyor, Thomas P. Bulla, describes a plat on the north side "opposite St. Joseph Iron Works": "First lot, No. 1, north of the southwest corner of section ten, 141½ rods, size of lots four rods in front, eight rods back. All streets four rods. Alleys one rod, running north and south, having eight lots in a block." On 8 March 1837 the plat of "H. H. Fowler's Addition to Mishawaka," also on the north side, was acknowledged by Henry H. Fowler. And on 19 April 1837 Bulla surveyed a second plat for G. W. R. Fowler, "laid out on the southwest fractional quarter of section ten, township thirty-seven north, range three east, 'Commencing eighty rods east of the southwest corner of section ten.' There is nothing on this plat to show whether it was intended as an addition or not; there being no reference to any other plat" (Howard). The last of the founding instruments is Francis P. Taylor's: acknowledged and filed 17 August 1836 as an addition to the town of St. Joseph Iron Works, surveyed by Bulla, its road from the west called, as Howard prints the name, the "Vistula and Loteas Road" — a second name on the road the Hurd out-lots call simply the Vistula Road, the added word unexplained in any source reached. Chapman groups Taylor's Addition with the filings of 1835; the instrument's acknowledgment, as Howard carries it, is dated the following August, and the dated instrument governs here.
Sources:
- Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), Chapter X, Secs. 2–5 — the Barbee plat's title, acknowledgment and Bray's description; the independent-town reading; the Indiana City acknowledgment and description with its reserved tract and squares; the three Fowler instruments with Bulla's descriptions; Taylor's Addition, its acknowledgment of 17 August 1836 and the road name as printed.
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Penn Township — Barbee's plat as an addition to the east side of the village; Taylor's Addition placed in the same year, 1835.