The Atlas and the Official Books (L16·2) — with the DF-17 Resolution

As of November 2026

DF-17, settled from the book itself. The banked set prints the maker of the 1875 St. Joseph County atlas two ways: Sources, Notable People and Population name Higgins, Belden & Co.; Businesses and Farms & Agriculture name Andreas & Baskin. The atlas's own title page, in the copy held at the Internet Archive (item illustratedhisto00higg), reads: "AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORICAL ATLAS OF ST. JOSEPH CO., INDIANA. / Compiled Drawn & Published from Personal Examinations & Surveys / HIGGINS BELDEN & Co / Lakeside Building Corner Clark & Adams Sts. CHICAGO 1875." The archive.org OCR of the title-page leaf is garbled, as decorative letterpress OCR often is; the reading above is the title page as transcribed from that same copy, and it is corroborated inside the volume, whose text refers to "Higgins, Belden & Co.'s Illustrated Historical Atlas," and by two independent catalog records: the Indiana State Library's St. Joseph County maps list ("Compiled, drawn & published from personal examinations & surveys by Higgins, Belden & Co. … Chicago: Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875") and the Notre Dame Archives bibliography, which lists it identically. Verdict: Higgins, Belden & Co. is the imprint. The Andreas & Baskin attribution is the error, and its mechanism is visible: the Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Indiana (1876) — a different book, a year later — was published by Baskin, Forster & Co., with A. T. Andreas associated with that state-atlas line. A county atlas and a state atlas from the same Chicago trade were conflated in the Businesses and Farms legs. The banked fragments are not silently rewritten by this section; the correction is entered here, at the apparatus leg, with its evidence, and the two fragments stand flagged.

What the atlas is, for this build. The 1875 atlas is the build's parcel-and-portrait bedrock: township plats, the farm roll the Farms leg works from, lithographed farm views (Boles, Laidlaw, A. Miller, Minnick, Vrooman — public-domain plates of an 1875 work, carried as an index fact with item-level verification required before any pull; see the photo ledger in the open-questions article below), and a biographical apparatus that sides, in the Laidlaw case, with Chapman's account over Howard's. It proves what stood and who held it in 1875; it does not prove value, and the Wealth section uses it accordingly.

The official books. The municipal and official volume class, as the build actually holds it: the county parcel layer (1,388 parcels in the town's layer, the Neighborhoods leg's working base); State Board of Accounts schedules and the Gateway portal record (Government leg); the IURC record in Cause 46221 (Utilities); the IDEM comment record and the federal court file (Kirk v. Town, 669 N.E.2d 1060, certiorari petition 97-277; the Pleasureland proceedings, 2001–2003); the BMV's published record; and the commissioners' records together with the town ordinance book — the last pair named but unread, and they are the settler of the incorporation instrument, GAP-O1-1. A volume's being official proves the act it records; this build prints commissioners' and council actions from the summaries and minutes actually reached, and names the unread books as gaps rather than citing them.

The basin-commission report class. The latest class member read for this section is the St. Joseph River Basin Commission's meeting record of September 4, 2025 (Q3 2025 meeting, Schrock Pavilion, Goshen): FY2025 final-quarter financials with a fund balance of $491,961.16 at June 30, 2025; the 2024 Midwest Biodiversity Institute water-monitoring data reviewed, with 2025 data due the following spring; and a 2026 meeting schedule of March 5, May 28, September 3 and December 3 — the May 28, 2026 date is the meeting at which the banked qualified Baugo Bay support letter was drafted, which is how this class connects to the Development article. The class also holds the Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan (MACOG / Basin Commission, September 2004), worked in the Farms leg. Commission minutes prove what the commission did and held; their water data is cited at the strength of the monitoring contractor's series, not re-derived.

Sources:

1. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (Chicago: Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875), title page, Internet Archive item illustratedhisto00higg (full text at archive.org/stream/illustratedhisto00higg); internal references to "Higgins, Belden & Co.'s" atlas.
2. Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County maps list (in.gov/library); University of Notre Dame Archives bibliography (archives.nd.edu) — corroborating catalog records.
3. Catalog records for the Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Indiana (1876), Baskin, Forster & Co. / A. T. Andreas association — the conflation source.
4. St. Joseph River Basin Commission minutes, September 4, 2025 (sjrbc.com); Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan, September 2004.
5. Banked Sources and Neighborhoods (parcel layer, official-volume classes, GAP-O1-1).