The roads surveyed through, 1832–33

THE GROUND'S FIRST INFRASTRUCTURE

Before the town was platted, the state surveyed two roads through its ground: in February 1832 the Indiana legislature appointed Nathan Coleman of Allen County, James Blair of Elkhart County and Samuel Martin of St. Joseph County commissioners "to make a survey, and locate a state road from Fort Wayne in Allen County by the nearest and best route to South Bend in St. Joseph County, making Goshen in Elkhart County a point" — the Goshen Road, called also the Old Fort Wayne Road. The survey went to George Crawford of Elkhart; his party traveled by oxcart, with many streams, no bridges and only one cabin between Fort Wayne and Benton Ford, and completed the survey in the fall of 1832 — the town history records that "the surveyors came through Osceola in September," naming the ground by the name it would not formally carry for five more years, a place-word of usage the record prints as it stands. Construction started in the spring of 1833; the road ran southwesterly out of the townsite toward Goshen and Fort Wayne, and a major portion of its course between Osceola and Fort Wayne is now U.S. 33. The second survey was the Vistula Road: the Army Engineers were authorized by Congress in 1832 to survey a road from Maumee Bay to the Mississippi with an appropriation of 25,000 dollars, completing their survey in 1835, while Indiana acted first — on 29 January 1833 the legislature appointed Hiram Dayton of St. Joseph County, Allen Tibbets of Elkhart County and Oliver Clappen of LaGrange County to locate the road from South Bend by the mouth of the Elkhart River and the LaGrange county seat to the state line toward Vistula, now Toledo. Its course came east out of South Bend on what is now Lincolnway East, forded the Baugo at Eagle Point and Stevely's Point — the creek's named fords, on this ground — and ran on into Elkhart on what is now Indiana Avenue; traffic was moving on it by late 1833. The two surveys fixed the ground's permanent geometry: an east-west road along the river's south bank and a diagonal road away southeast, crossing at the creek. The town was platted four years later at the crossing they had already made. The narrative detail of this article — the acts' texts, the commissioners' names, the fords — is the town history's; the county histories carry the roads at far less strength, and the difference is itself part of the record: Chapman's whole treatment of the Fort Wayne road is one sentence, that Crawford's survey, "as surveyed by George Crawford from Fort Wayne to South Bend, with field notes, was ordered recorded May 15, 1832" (Chapman, p. 368), and Howard treats the Vistula road as a wilderness highway laid out by special act, without the survey particulars (Howard, pp. 234–235). The acts and the fords therefore stand at the town history's strength, the Crawford record line at Chapman's.