State Road 4: three roads wearing one number

1932–2016 · THE WESTERN SEGMENT IS THE TOWN'S

State Road 4 today is not one road but three, and the town's piece is the western one: the western segment runs from SR 2 at La Porte east through North Liberty to US 31 near Lakeville; the central segment is an urban Goshen stub (the "Philip T. Warner Highway," 5.310 miles, SR 15 to SR 13); the eastern segment runs 5.935 miles from SR 327 at Helmer to Interstate 69 at Ashley. North Liberty therefore sits on a segment that touches neither Goshen nor Ashley — any account of SR 4 as a single Goshen–La Porte road is a pre-2016 memory, not the present fact. The designation history sorts the segments out: the pre-1926 southern SR 4 was renumbered away (the US 41/US 50 corridors) and the number lay unused from 1926 to 1932, when the Goshen–SR 13 piece was designated SR 4; the town's segment entered the state system as SR 4 between 1942 and 1945The eastern end was cut back to I-69 in 1970–71; SR 727 (1939–41) was absorbed in 1949 or 1950, the pair unmerged in the sources reached; and the town's segment was extended east to the new US 31 interchange in 2014, while the Goshen stub left the system in 2015–16.

Through town, SR 4 is Center Street — the east–west arm of the plat's crossing — and east of town it fronts Potato Creek State Park (the park's address is 25601 State Road 4) before continuing past the US 31 interchange as Pierce Road, a county road: the corridor outlives the designation, and the name changes where the number ends. Two conflicts ride with the segment, printed whole. Conflict C106: the western segment's length prints as "25 mi" in route description, 26.5 miles in the Wikipedia list's figure, and 25.401 miles to the Pierce Road junction in the Reference Post Book's junction table, with the segment's terminus beyond that point — three figures for one road, its settler the Reference Post Book read directly (gap G-W2R-2). Conflict C107: the Wikipedia list's table carries a "Formed 1935" cell for the western segment, with no map citation reached behind it, against the 1942/1945 commission-map pair that brackets its actual appearance; the map pair is the stronger carrier, but the 1935 cell prints beside it, unmerged and unexplained. One more refusal is printed for the record: the 1917 "Original State Road 4" was the southern Evansville–Lawrenceburg road; it has no continuity with this corridor and is not its ancestor. And the junction's two logs are printed correctly here, because the banked spine mislabels one of them: the SR 23 × SR 4 junction stands at SR 4 mile 17.377 on SR 4's log and at SR 23 mile 24.442 on SR 23's log (INDOT Reference Post Book, July 2016, as carried). The Story of North Liberty section's parenthetical "(SR 4 mile 24.442)" attaches SR 23's number to SR 4 — a framing error, resolved's note as an assembly conform against the Story of North Liberty section, not a conflict; the banked spine is not edited.

Principal sources: INDOT Reference Post Book (July 2016) as carried at AARoads (secondary carrier; the book itself stands as gap G-W2R-2); the Indiana highway-list and route-description record (secondary); ISHC map series 1942/1945 (map strength, via the highway-history record).