The drift and the lobes

THE CARRIED GROUND

The ground itself is carried ground: the ice that crossed this county came in lobes — the Michigan lobe down the lake basin, the Saginaw lobe from the northeast, the Huron-Erie lobe from the east — and their meeting over the St. Joseph valley is the county's glacial frame, dug at full strength in the Mishawaka and Granger legs. This ground's share of that frame is its south-bank form: outwash and terrace along the river, the valley's train of sand and gravel laid by the meltwater that ran where the river now runs, and behind the terrace the till plain the township farms. The first settlers' own description of the surface survives in Samuel Ireland's memoir of Penn Township, and it is a glacial description whether or not he knew it: the favored settlements stood on oak openings — the light, easily worked soils of the outwash margins — "the land being what is known as oak openings, easy of cultivation." The openings drew the settlement of 1830 to the river and the creek, and the prairie Timothy Moat first occupied took his name from the same ground. The soils chose the neighborhoods before the town existed; the memoir, quoted at length in the settlement article below, is this section's first-hand witness to the drift's surface.