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The frame
The town stands at the southeastern extremity of Terre Coupee prairie, a body of rich, once-marshy ground that Chapman measured at "over four miles in diameter and contains 3,000 or 4,000 acres, which is worth $80 to $120 an acre" in 1880, "almost as level as a barn floor," and that Howard measures six or seven miles east to west by four or five north to south. The prairie's drainage made it farmland; the hill at its southeastern edge made the townsite. The survey frame is measured, not assumed: sampling the Bureau of Land Management's CadNSDI survey layers in November 2026 places the townsite in Township 38 North, Range 1 West, of the Second Principal Meridian (township identifier IN020380N0010W0) — not Range 1 East, which the First Principal Meridian governs only in Indiana's eastern tier. The federal place point falls in section 35; the original plat, by its own dedication, lies in the northeast quarter of section 34; and a sample of the town's present envelope touches sections 25 through 36 across the township lines — the town's growth crosses section and township lines, while its legal ground is the section-34 plat. Southwest of the township runs the edge of the Kankakee marsh, the wet ground the Michigan Road was bent through South Bend to avoid.