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HOWARD VOL. 1, CH. II, PP. 231–236 · G-SP-1 DISPOSITION
The frame named Howard's "Ferries, Roads and Bridges" as the settler for the town's founding road course. The chapter was read whole, and it is silent: it names no North Liberty, no Liberty Township, and no Potato Creek anywhere in its six pages. Its ferries are all on the St. Joseph River — the first licence, to Timothy Griffith for a ferry two miles below South Bend, granted 6 September 1831, with rates fixed per man, horse, wagon and head of stock — and its bridges are that river's: the county's first, at Mishawaka in 1837 (the Mishawaka build's whole), then South Bend's Michigan Street bridge (1846) and LaSalle bridge (1868), every one a St. Joseph River crossing. Its roads are the county's trunk lines only: "The Sauk Trail... followed later by the Chicago Road"; the Vistula Road, "used as a post road for a time," for which "a survey across the county was made in 1859"; and the Michigan Road, which "enters the county at its southeast corner... passes through Plymouth, Lakeville and South Bend," a corridor "about twenty miles in length through the county... completed during the years 1834 and 1835." The printed course confirms the bypass at the history's own hand: the county's engineered road ran through Lakeville, east of this town.
What the chapter does give the town is the system that served it, at county strength: the first county roads "were laid out on petitions to the county commissioners," with viewers appointed to lay out the course and assess damages, and "many of the early roads closely followed the old Indian trails"; the four-dollar road-tax buyout "for their teams and tools for two days, and... work in person two days"; plank construction on one corridor only — "several miles of the Michigan Road, south of South Bend, were planked," with plank or gravel laid where traffic demanded; and the gravel rule: "the township trustees compelled the graveling of the roads, through the power of the ordinary road labor," while "the modern road laws, which authorize the construction of gravel roads by the State, have never been applied in St. Joseph county." Disposition of gap G-SP-1: the settler has been run and is exhausted — Howard's chapter cannot close it, because the chapter holds nothing for this ground.G-W2R-4. Chapman's Liberty Township chapter is likewise without a roads section: its one journey, the pre-mill settlers' trip of thirty-five miles to the Elkhart River falls for grinding, names a destination and no course, and the township's "old Indian trail" belongs to the tribes file — pointed to here, not re-told.
Principal sources: Howard (1907), Vol. 1, Ch. II "Ferries, Roads and Bridges," pp. 231–236, and Ch. IX §II.2, p. 310 (ldsgenealogy transcription, read first-hand); Chapman (1880), Liberty Township (read first-hand).