The federal survey as a map event

1820s–1829

The first map of this ground that the record proves is the United States survey itself: the rectangular grid laid over the cession of 1826, which fixed the township lines, the sections, and — in the fall of 1829 — the very quarter-sections on which the town would stand. The frame is measured in the land leg from the Bureau of Land Management's cadastral record: Township 38 North, Range 1 West, of the Second Principal Meridian (township identifier IN020380N0010W0), the plat of survey being the General Land Office's own sheet for this township. It was inside that sheet that the scholar selections of the Treaty of 1826's schedule were laid out — Johnston Lykins making the Carey Mission scholars' selections in the fall of 1829, the northeast quarter of section 34 among them, the quarter that would become New Carlisle's plat six years later. The survey's sheet is thus not background to the town's map history; it is the town's first map in substance, the drawing from which every later plat in this section descends. One account on it remains unclosed and prints here as the land leg banked it: the disposition of section 16, the school section, in this township — the frame's standing gap, whose settler is the General Land Office's tract books, named there and pointed to here.

Sources

1. U.S.
2. Treaty of 1826 (7 Stat. 295), schedule — the scholar quarters the survey had to carry.