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LOTS 66 BY 132, A STREET THAT CHANGED ITS NAME AT THE CREEK, AND 39 PARCELS THAT STILL ANSWER TO IT
The 1837 plat drew a complete neighborhood on paper and the town declined to live in it: Howard prints the record whole (pp. 309–310, carried in the Story of Osceola section): a plat on the west part of the southwest part of section 9, its beginning corner on the river between sections 8 and 9, lots each 66 feet front and 132 feet back, alleys 14 feet wide, signed "JOHN A. HENRICKS. November 17, 1837." Its main street came in from the west as "Vistula street" and went out east as the "Road to Toledo," and the plat showed "an elaborate system of mill races, triple in form, connecting the river on the north, with the Babaugo creek, on the east" — a mill town's neighborhood, drawn around water power that the railroad would bypass within fifteen years. The legislature vacated the plat by act approved 31 January 1842. But a vacated plat dies as a corporation, not as a description:'s parcel instrument, about 39 of the town's parcels still carry the founding plat in their legal descriptions, under the recorder's compressed form "Osceola Pl Pro" and its variants (including "O P Osceola"), with lot numbers running past 212. The founding neighborhood therefore survives the way paper neighborhoods do — not as streets anyone walks, but as the words a deed still has to say. The main Elkhart–Toledo highway runs through the former site, as Howard notes; the neighborhood's modern existence is textual, and this section prints it at exactly that strength.