The village test: none on the townsite in the reached record

Tested, November 2026

No Potawatomi village on the townsite appears in any record reached — the finding prints as a tested negative, with the record searched named. The record searched is the frame of this whole build: Chapman's Liberty Township chapter (pages 718–732), read whole; Howard's Liberty section and his North Liberty town section, read whole; the National Park Service's nomination for the Commercial Historic District, with its historical-background narrative drawn from the county histories, the 1875 atlas and the town's newspapers; and the treaty texts themselves. None of them places a village at the corner of sections 28, 29, 32 and 33 or anywhere in present Liberty Township. The villages the instruments do name for this valley stand elsewhere: La-vache-qui-pisse and Macousin village, the halfway point between which bounds the 1828 treaty's first tract, are on the St. Joseph river in the county's north; Seek's village, whose reservation anchors the 1828 tract's southern line, is in the Elkhart country to the east. The first settlements the histories date near the site are the settlers' own, in 1833, the year after the cession. The settler for any deeper word is named plainly: the General Land Office surveyors' field notes for Township 36 North, Range 1 East, which record the villages, trails, fields and improvements the survey lines crossed, and the Indian Claims Commission record for this valley. If a village stood on this ground, those are the records that would say so; until they are read, the finding stands: none in the reached record.