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Measured 1880 · THE FEATURE AT ITS CARRIERS' FIGURES
The site's maker is not a bend or a rapids — it is a shallow lake on a watershed divide, and both halves of that description can be measured. The prairie first, in Chapman's measure (p. 765): Terre Coupee prairie is "over four miles in diameter and contains 3,000 or 4,000 acres," its land at $80 to $120 an acre in 1880, "almost as level as a barn floor, and just sandy enough" — and before drainage it was marsh, the 1878 telling's "large, shallow lake" that cut the land off by water for miles around. The divide second, in Chapman's water-shed passage: the county's watershed line runs west and northwest past the headwaters of the Kankakee, with the streams north of it flowing to the St. Joseph River and Lake Michigan, and south of it to the Kankakee, the Illinois and the Mississippi — and so level is the division that "a mill-race was once dug from the head waters of the Kankakee to the St. Joseph river at South Bend, and the waters of that river made to flow, by the assistance of art, in both directions from this fountain head." The carrying place is the crossing of that divide: the portage of the folklore article, where canoes crossed from the St. Joseph's water to the Kankakee's past the lake-prairie's edge, and where the Michigan Road and every road since has followed — the town standing on its hill at the prairie's southeastern extremity, overlooking the plain, precisely where a road crossing a divide passes a lake that is becoming a farm. Feature, measure and maker in one: a four-mile lake-prairie on the flattest divide in the county, and the road that had to cross both.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), pp. 765 and 337–338 — the prairie's diameter and acreage; the water-shed line and the mill-race, verbatim; read at the page for this section (LDSGenealogy OCR text, parts 29 and 75).
- Chapman (1880), pp. 335–336 — the 1878 telling's shallow lake, carried in this history.