The frame: the county in numbers, the township at its size

1880–2022 · THE AGRICULTURAL-CENSUS FRAME AND THE TOWNSHIP'S MAGNITUDES

The censuses of agriculture count farms by county, not by township, and the county series is therefore printed first, at pointer size, as the frame this township's story stands in: St. Joseph County in the modern census profiles counts 629 farms on 149,981 acres (average 238 acres) in 2017, and 547 farms on 153,034 acres (average 280 acres) in 2022, with crops returning 80 percent of the county's farm sales and livestock 20 percent in the later count (U.S. Census of Agriculture, county profiles, 2017 and 2022). The county's whole series — from its nineteenth-century wheat height through the 1950 count forward — is South Bend's farms file's whole and is not retold here; what the frame says for Penn is the direction: fewer, larger farms on a slowly shrinking farmed acreage, inside a county whose land was being taken by its cities at the edges. No census of agriculture prints a Penn Township line in any volume, and no township farm count is stated anywhere in this section; the township's course is carried below from the farm-by-farm record, as the record gives it.

The township's own magnitudes are the county histories': Chapman's taxable-acreage table gives Penn 40,534 acres (p. 337) — the largest township figure in the county on that table — and Howard states the same primacy in the surveyor's measure: Penn "still remains the largest township in the county, containing sixty-five and a half sections" (p. 292). Against that size stands the primitive condition of the first farming, in Chapman's Penn narrative: the pioneers of the late 1820s ground their first wheat at a mill below Niles, Michigan — there was no mill in the county to grind it — and "mail first got at Edwardsville, Cass County" in Michigan (Chapman, p. 789). The township's farm economy thus began as an export economy by necessity: grain out to a Michigan mill, letters out to a Michigan post office, on ground whose own mill seat (the Businesses leg's record) and whose own institutions were still to be built. Chapman's agricultural chapter prints a township-by-township table of the county's products for 1880 from the assessors' returns, in which Penn stands with its own row; that table's columns survive in the machine-read copies reached interleaved past reliable reconstruction, and its Penn figures are therefore carried as a named gap in this section's closing roll — the printed page (Chapman, pp. 664–665) is its settler — rather than rebuilt here from scrambled numerals.

Sources:

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture, St. Joseph County profiles (2017; 2022) — the frame figures, pointer size.
2. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), p. 337 (taxable acreage), p. 789 (pioneer conditions), pp. 664–665 (the 1880 products table, as flagged); Howard (1907), vol. 1, p. 292 (the township's size).