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 beginning, in the office of the county recorder — an office joined at the county's start with the clerk's: Lathrop M. Taylor, the trader, was elected the county's first clerk and recorder on 18 October 1830. The archive of the survey itself was assembled by order. At the November term of 1831 the Board of County Commissioners appointed William Clark county surveyor "and was ordered to procure certified copies from the Registers of different land offices where land had been sold; field notes of townships, ranges, sections, fractional sections, as originally surveyed, and deposit them in the Recorder's office of St. Joseph county, according to law" (Chapman, printing the commissioners' record). The order is the founding charter of the county's land archive: the federal survey's notes, copied from the land offices' registers — the plural is the record's own, and matches the two-office market of the entry above — and laid up where every later title search would begin.

The surveyor's side of the paper runs in a named succession on this ground. Tyra W. Bray, county surveyor, laid out both Hurd's plat and Barbee's in 1833–1835. Thomas P. Bulla surveyed Taylor's Addition and the Fowler plats in 1836–1837, and by his own memoir in Chapman — "In the year 1838 I was appointed County Surveyor by the Commissioners' Court, which position I held till the year 1856" — he held the office through the town's first two decades of additions. The office's modern charge is statutory and specific: under Indiana Code 36-2-12-11 the county surveyor "shall keep and maintain a corner record book" containing "a record and an index by location of all the original government survey corners," with outline maps of each section showing every corner on record and where its reference may be found, and the corners are perpetuated by checking and referencing at least five percent of them every year. Kendrick's state-line posts are perpetuated under a frame of their own: Indiana's 2019 law created a boundary commission of registered surveyors — one each from Elkhart, LaGrange, LaPorte, St. Joseph and Steuben counties — to set permanent monuments at the mile-post positions of the original government survey of October 1827, and the county surveyor's records are among the evidence the search works from.

Upstream of the county, the reader's settling route runs to three more shelves. The Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office records carry the federal side entire — the township plats, the field notes and the patents — searchable online by name and by legal description. The Indiana State Archives holds the land offices' tract books and the compiled survey notes (the La Porte–Winamac district's entries of 1833–1855 alone run to 48,562 indexed records), and the field notes themselves have been digitized from the National Archives. And the county's own earliest papers — including the 1829 survey's field notes in their 1858 copy — survive on microfilm in the University of Notre Dame Archives' Saint Joseph County Records. Everything after a patent — Hurd's lot sales, the Battell family's deed of 1881, the replats of the twentieth century — is a county matter, in the deed and plat books of the Recorder's office at South Bend, where the paper has lived since a board of commissioners ordered it gathered there in 1831.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the November 1831 order to County Surveyor William Clark, quoted from the commissioners' record; Bulla's "Reminiscences" (the county surveyorship, 1838–1856); Taylor as first clerk and recorder, elected 18 October 1830 (the county history carried in the 1875 atlas).
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), Chapter X — Bray as "St. Joseph county surveyor" on the plats of 1833 and 1835; Bulla as surveyor of the plats of 1836–1837.
3. Indiana Code 36-2-12-11 — the county surveyor's corner record book, its contents, and the annual five-percent perpetuation of the original government survey corners.
4. Indiana's Indiana–Michigan Boundary Line Commission (2019) and the St. Joseph County Surveyor's boundary history, as reported in the South Bend press (2025) — the re-monumentation of Kendrick's 1827 mile posts.
5. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Land Records" — the tract books, field notes and plat maps at the State Archives; the compiled survey notes digitized from the National Archives; the LaPorte–Winamac index.
6. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO) — the early county records on microfilm, 1829–1865 in the bulk.