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1830–1831 · the frame every township lived under
Law came to Terre Coupee Prairie in November 1831, and one of its first four officers was a man of this township. St. Joseph County was organized in August 1830; its courts sat at South Bend, and its coercive apparatus was built in a single season. At the November 1831 term of the Board of Commissioners, four constables were appointed for the county, and among them stands Barzilla Druliner of New Carlisle — the township's memory-man of the people file, wearing a constable's authority at twenty-four. Benjamin McCarty was Sheriff; he was allowed forty dollars at the same term for assessing the county's unassessed property, "a service which the owners would just as soon he had neglected altogether," Chapman notes. On 31 October 1831, at a session held at Alexis Coquillard's house, a jail was ordered built; the November specifications survive and are the county's first penal architecture: a gaol thirty feet long and sixteen wide, walls of white-oak timber hewed at least a foot square, floors of like timber, a partition wall through the center, corners half-dovetailed, built to keep a floor from being raised and a prisoner from leaving. John Egbert of this township's first family was appointed county agent to carry out the county-seat bond provisions, with Jacob Egbert among his bondsmen. Within the township, justice began closer to the ground: Israel Rush, who helped raise the township's first cabin, was its first Justice of the Peace, and died in 1837. The succession of the township's justices continues below; the sheriff's succession is the county's and is carried in the county's builds.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), organization chapter (commissioners' proceedings of Oct.–Nov. 1831: jail order and specifications; constables; Sheriff McCarty; the Egbert agency), read first-hand.
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, p. 765 (Israel Rush, first Justice of the Peace).