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Second Principal Meridian
The townsite is measured, not assumed: T36N, R1E, Second Principal Meridian — by the plat's own dedication and by independent measurement. The dedication Howard prints settles the frame in the record's own words — the plat lies "on the southwest quarter of section twenty-eight and the southeast quarter of section twenty-nine, in township thirty-six north, in range one east," its beginning point "the corner of sections twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-two and thirty-three," surveyed by Tyra W. Bray. The measurement agrees. The Second Principal Meridian's baseline stands at 38°28′20″ N on the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker text — the Bureau of Land Management's own table gives the initial point as 38°28′14″ N, a six-second variance in the constants that changes nothing below — and the meridian itself at 86°28′ W in the Bureau's rounded text, 86°27′21″ W in the survey gazetteer. The town point, 41.532403° N, stands 211.3 miles north of the baseline: 35.22 six-mile tiers, inside the thirty-sixth — Township 36 North. It stands 1.44 miles east of the meridian on the one reading and 2.00 miles on the other — inside the first range column east — Range 1 East; and it falls within section 29, in the immediate neighborhood of the plat's southeast-quarter-of-29 ground. The calibration closes the working: the same arithmetic run on the sister town to the northwest, whose dedication Howard prints as the northeast quarter of section 34, township 38 north, range 1 west, at 41.700° N, returns 37.14 tiers — T38N exactly. The two towns stand on opposite sides of the meridian, the one R1 West and this one R1 East, and the Second Principal Meridian passes between them. Liberty the civil township is not one congressional township: its 1837 bounds ran across townships 35 and 36 and ranges 1 west to 2 east at their edges, and its present 42.88 square miles exceed a single survey township — the civil and congressional frames print separately, here and everywhere in this build.