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1830–1907 · THE COUNTY FRAME AND THE TOWNSHIP'S OWN LAW
For its first seven decades the Osceola ground had no law of its own at all, and the frame that governed it is the county's, printed here at boundary size as every build in this county prints it. St. Joseph County was organized in 1830, its government passing to a board of commissioners on January 19, 1831. The first law the record pays for is sheriff's work: Samuel L. Cottrell was paid thirty-two dollars for sheriff's services in September 1831, and Benjamin McCarty stands as sheriff by November of that year. In the same November sitting the commissioners appointed the county's first constables — Lilly, Cissna, Druliner and Garrard, the record preserving one given name imperfectly — and ordered a jail built: the county's first jail, a building ordered as an act of government before it stood as a place, stood at the county seat in South Bend. Osceola's felons, when there were any, went down the river road to that jail and those courts for the whole of the nineteenth century, and the ground's own first officers were the township's: the justice of the peace and the constable of Penn Township, the petty court a farmer could walk to, hearing the township's assaults, debts, strays and liquor cases. Indiana kept that justice-court system into the 1970s, when the state's court reorganization abolished the justice-of-the-peace courts and folded their work into the county courts.
The village itself long had no corporate existence to hold a marshal or a court. When Timothy E. Howard wrote the county's standard history in 1907, his chapter on the towns filed Osceola not among the incorporated places but in the section headed "Unincorporated Towns" — the village of the 1837 plat, a post office since 1854, still unincorporated seventy years on. Incorporation came later; the date does not stand in any open source reached for this build, and it is carried in this section's closing article as a named gap with its settlers, because the marshal's course and the town court's course both date from it and neither can be honestly opened earlier than the record opens them. No lockup, calaboose or town jail of the village's own stands in the record reached, either; that item is named with the same gap.
Sources: St. Joseph County Commissioners' Record of 1830–1831, as reprinted in the county's 1875 atlas (the sheriff's-services payment, the November 1831 constable appointments and jail order); T. E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), ch. IX, "The Towns," § II, "Unincorporated Towns," § 1, "Osceola," p. 309.