The founding road: the treaty strip and the survey

1826–1834

The Michigan Road begins as a clause in a treaty. Article Two of the treaty with the Potawatomi of 16 October 1826 — the same instrument whose schedule of grants put the townsite's quarter-section in Lazarus Bourissa's hands, dug whole in this build's land section — ceded to Indiana a strip of land one hundred feet wide from Lake Michigan to the Wabash, with one section of good land contiguous to the road for every mile of its length, to be sold to pay for the building: a land grant the record totals at roughly 168,000 acres, and the state's historical markers at 170,580. The United States confirmed the grant by act of 2 March 1827. In 1828 the General Assembly appointed three commissioners — John McDonald, Chester Elliott, and John I. Neely — to lay out the road from Lake Michigan to Indianapolis and to choose the lake harbor; they selected the mouth of Trail Creek, where Michigan City now stands, and surveyed two routes south: a direct line through La Porte and the Kankakee swamps, and a line thirty miles longer by way of the south bend of the St. Joseph River. In January 1830 the state chose the river route — the act of 13 January 1830 accepting the South Bend survey, the act of 29 January 1830 establishing the road from Logansport by Indianapolis and Greensburg to Madison on the Ohio — and a new board, Samuel Hanna, William Polke, and Abraham McClelland, took up the land selection that financed the work, the granted lands going on sale from the first Monday of December 1830. The road was to be cut one hundred feet wide, cleared of timber and grubbed thirty feet in the center, in the manner of the National Road; its whole length stood substantially complete by 1834, at a cost the state's marker record gives as $242,000. It was Indiana's first great state road, and the removal road of 1838 besides: the Potawatomi who had granted its strip were marched out of Indiana in part along their own cession, a course told in this build's tribes section.

Principal sources: Treaty of 16 October 1826, Article Two, as printed in Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties; Leon M. Gordon II, "Effects of the Michigan Road on Northern Indiana, 1830–1860," and Gene Prather, "The Construction of the Michigan Road, 1830–1840," Indiana Magazine of History; the Michigan Road historical-marker record.