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The Plats and Surveys as Trail Documents

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What the maps file established for maps generally holds with special force for trails: each documentary layer can prove only what it was made to show. The federal township surveys of 1827–31 were made to sell land; their plats show the river, the sections, and the state line, and their field notes — the layer that can hold a trail — stand unread for this question, as the Dragoon article states. The first town map, the 1863 Stokes & Shober inset on the county landowner map, was made to show a town; it shows streets and the race, and no trail. The Sanborn fire-insurance editions, six of them between 1886 and 1913, were made to price risk; they show the built riverfront in fine grain — mills, bridges, the race — a landscape from which the trails had already vanished, and their value to this section is the negative proof of the vanishing's completeness by 1886. The 1979 county survey and the Register nominations that followed were made to preserve buildings; the trail record enters them only as setting. The living map, the regional GIS kept by the Michiana Area Council of Governments, is made to administer the present; it carries the modern trail system as a layer, and so the documentary chain that begins with a surveyor's chain ends, for now, with the trail system itself become a surveyed thing — the first trails on this ground ever drawn at survey strength being the recreational ones, drawn by their builders. The modern system's file, next, is correspondingly the strongest in this fragment: it rests on the records of the people who built it.

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Using this page? Copy a credit line. Last updated November 12, 2026.

Source: The Plats and Surveys as Trail Documents, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/mishawaka/trails/plats-and-surveys-as-trail-documents/