Plainfield: the atlas's other Olive Township town

1830s, at atlas strength

The 1875 atlas's town list for Olive Township carries one more laid-out place besides New Carlisle and Terre Coupee: Plainfield, west of New Carlisle on the railroad's line — a paper town of the settlement decade that no other record read for this build develops. The atlas's county-history section lists it among the township's towns, laid out in a December of the 1830s — the day and year stand illegible in the digitized text read, and print here as illegible rather than guessed — seated in Olive Township on the L.S. & M.S. Railroad west of New Carlisle. That railroad dating is itself a wrinkle the record must carry openly: the rails did not reach this country until 1851, so the atlas's railroad is the town's seat described by its later landmark, not its 1830s circumstance. Chapman's history gives the name one more appearance, and a pointed one: in his telling the settlers' fort of 1832 stood "at Plainfield," against Howard's and Haines's placement of the fort at Garwood's on Terre Coupee ground — the conflict standing whole in Wars & Military Service, where it belongs, with the observation this section adds only as geography: if Chapman's Plainfield is the atlas's, his fort stood west of New Carlisle, not northeast at Hamilton, and the two tellings differ by the whole width of the town. The want is banked as GAP-NC6-NBHD-1: Plainfield's plat, proprietor, and fate, whose settlers are the atlas's county-history page read at page grade in a legible copy, the county recorder's plat record, and the commissioners' record of the 1830s. One exclusion is printed with the article, of the four-doors kind: this is Olive Township's Plainfield, a St. Joseph County paper town — not the Plainfield of Hendricks County, which is a living town with a history of its own and no part in this one.

Sources

1. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875), county-history section — the town list's Plainfield entry, read from the digitized text with its date illegible.
2. Chapman (1892) — the fort "at Plainfield," as banked at conflict strength in Wars & Military Service.