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, and the reservation passed to the state, not to the land office. Mishawaka's founding ground was that section: Hurd's plat, as its own dedication states, was "laid out on the north part of lot number six and the northeast part of lot number five, in school section number sixteen, township thirty-seven north of range number three east," and Indiana City's plat, three years later, took in "the northwest fraction of section sixteen" as well. Indiana sold its school lands through a machinery of its own, modeled on the federal example but run by state and county officers: the congressional township's school trustees subdivided the section into numbered lots and fixed a minimum price for each division, and the county's school commissioner conducted the sales — the form in which the system's surviving records elsewhere in Indiana show it working, division by division and price by price, in the years just before 1833.

Chapman's Penn Township history gives the Mishawaka transaction its fullest surviving form, and it is printed here as it stands: "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 1875 county atlas carries the same purchase in five words — Hurd "bought the land where Mishawaka now stands, January 1, 1833, of the commissioner" — and the city's commissioned history prices it: the 640-acre section at $1.25 an acre, $800 in all. The price is itself a piece of the record's shape: $1.25 was the era's standard minimum — the federal minimum under the Land Act of 1820, and the floor price the school trustees' subdivisions elsewhere in Indiana show fixed against division after division of their sections. What the published record does not carry is the instrument itself: the commissioner's name in January 1833, the deed's book and page, and whether the $800 took the whole section in the one sale or the section's lots as the trustees had divided them — Hurd's plat occupies parts of two lots only, and the balance of the section passed out of his hands in the lot sales the Wealth section carries at deed strength. The county's school-land records — the commissioner's record, kept with the county's school papers — are the named settling source.

One tension in the record is printed rather than smoothed. Chapman's parenthesis — "(being school land), where Mishawaka now stands" — is written of the townsite generally. Howard's surveyor, describing the Barbee plat of 1835, lays that plat in Section 15, which was never the school section: Barbee's ground was federal land, entered at a land office like any other section. Read together, the two histories divide the founding ground exactly as the plats divide it: the school section carried the Iron Works and part of Indiana City; the sections around it were the government's until the proprietors entered them. Chapman's phrase stands at the strength of the founding ground it was written about — the ground of the furnace and the original plat — and no wider claim is printed from it.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Penn Township — the school-land purchase of 1 January 1833, on the settlers' petition to the School Commissioner, Hurd's promise of a blast furnace on the site.
2. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875), History of Mishawaka — the purchase "of the commissioner," 1 January 1833.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the 640-acre School Section at $1.25 an acre (see the Story of Mishawaka section).
4. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), Chapter X — Hurd's plat dedication ("school section number sixteen") and the Indiana City plat description (the northwest fraction of Section 16); the Barbee plat laid in Section 15.
5. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the school section reserved in each township and administered by the state; the state system modeled on the federal.
6. Records of the School Commission Lands, Shelby County, Indiana (a surviving county example of the state system, 1829) — township trustees subdividing Section 16 into divisions, fixing minimum prices ($1.25 an acre and upward), and directing the commissioner to sell; carried here as the system's documented form, not as Mishawaka's own record.