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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 support of schools — bought on 1 January 1833 for $800 and sold off in lots by the school lands' own officers. That purchase is the first of the three reserved classes this entry accounts for. The school lands are accounted whole: the section was bought entire, at a stated price on a stated date, and its alienation is the town's own plat record — the Iron Works plat and Indiana City laid across it, the additions that followed, each lot sale an entry in the deed record the land fragment's records article describes. The school section did not linger as a reserve; it became the city, lot by lot, and the trust it was reserved for was paid out of those sales.
The swamp lands are the second class, and their account runs at county and state size because that is the size of the record. Congress granted the swamp and overflowed lands to the states by the act of 28 September 1850, the proceeds to be spent on the levees and drains that would reclaim them. Indiana's share was enormous: by 1854 the federal government had approved the designation of 9,811,682 acres as wet lands eligible for cession to Indiana, figures Stephen Strausberg's study of the act in the Indiana Magazine of History prints from the federal record. The surveyors who first walked this region had marked its character plainly — Jeremiah Smith, the government surveyor whose notes Strausberg quotes, called the country embracing St. Joseph County "rather uninviting to the capitalist and land speculator" — and the county's own low ground, the marshy bottoms along the river and Baugo Creek and the wet prairies of Penn Township's south, was part of the class the designation swept in. Indiana moved at once: the state's 1851 act required county surveyors to locate and designate the swamp lands, the machinery the St. Joseph County Parks' drainage history preserves, and the acts that followed — drainage associations in 1852, landowner petitions to the county commissioners from 1863 — built the ditch system on the proceeds and the assessments. The county's swamp ground drew the era's biggest drainage corporation to its records: the Kankakee Valley Draining Company, organized under the 1852 act to reclaim the Kankakee valley, recorded its articles of association in St. Joseph County among the eight counties of its course, a fact the Indiana Supreme Court's November 1869 decision in O'Reiley v. Kankakee Valley Draining Company preserves in the pleadings. What cannot be stated from the record reached is the township figure: how many acres of Penn Township were designated swamp land, and what those acres sold for, stands in the state's swamp-land selection lists and tract records at the Indiana State Archives and in the county surveyor's designation record of 1851 — the named records that would settle the class at township size. This entry prints the class whole at the size the open record gives it and names the gap rather than filling it.
The county purchase is the third class, and its account is short because the record is short. Fort Wayne's land record holds a county purchase inside its plat — a county buying ground in the town it seated. Mishawaka was never the county seat; the seat was fixed at South Bend, across the river, and no purchase of reserved land by St. Joseph County inside the Mishawaka plat reaches this record — not in the county histories, not in the deed course the land fragment prints. The county's land dealings on this ground in the record are the ordinary ones of roads, ditches and the poor-relief ground told in their own sections. If a county purchase inside the plat exists, it stands in the commissioners' records and the county deed books at the courthouse in South Bend, which are the named settlers for the class; until they are read, the honest account is the one printed here: of the three reserved classes, the school section is accounted lot by lot, the swamp lands are accounted at state and county size with the township figure outstanding, and the county purchase does not appear.