The state as landowner: office, survey, and first sales

1830–1835

Ceded in 1826, the county's lands "did not come into market until the spring of 1830." So Chapman prints the sequence, and the frame around it: the land office for this country was at Crawfordsville — the Olive Township settlers, Howard records, came "by way of Niles, Michigan, or Crawfordsville, Indiana"; the survey ran on the Second Principal Meridian, township 38 north, range 1 west for this ground; and the first entries in the county, on 19 April 1830, were John Johnston's southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of section 11, Township 38 North, Range 3 East, and Samuel Bell's southeast quarter of the southwest quarter of the same section — the county's east, printed at county strength as Chapman gives them, not as this ground's sales. For this ground the first transfers are the scholar selections of 1829 and the private course that followed: the Carlisle purchase of 1835 above, and, at the strength of a settler's own reminiscence, Granville Woolman's father's 1833 scouting and 1834 purchase of the land "where we now live, for which he paid $2.50 per acre, it being Indian land" — Woolman's own words for ground bought on the prairie in the grant era, printed as he states them. The reserved school section is the frame's one unclosed account: the sixteenth section of Township 38 North, Range 1 West does not appear in the record read, and its disposition stands as a named gap whose settler is the General Land Office tract books and the county's school-land record. Olive Township's taxable measure, when Chapman prints it, is 36,111 acres of the county's 285,831 — and by 1836, Chapman records, "about all the Government land was taken up" in the township.