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GAP-O1-7 — THE FRAME SETTLED, THE ENTRIES AT BOOK STRENGTH, THE TRACT BOOKS NAMED
Penn's ground was sold through the same office sequence as the rest of the county, and the sequence is now fixed at district strength: the Indiana State Archives' land-records account gives the federal offices in order — Cincinnati (1801), Vincennes (1804), Jeffersonville (1807), Brookville to Indianapolis (1819/1825), Terre Haute to Crawfordsville (1819/1828), Fort Wayne (1822), and LaPorte (1833), the last moved to Winamac in 1839 and closed 31 January 1855. The LaPorte district, when created, embraced all or part of nineteen counties including the whole of St. Joseph, and its first sale took place on 12 August 1833; before its creation, "a significant portion of its lands had been offered for sale in the Fort Wayne and Crawfordsville offices" — some 500,000 acres actually purchased — and those earlier sales are not in the LaPorte–Winamac books. The district's own database, built from its tract books, holds 48,562 records, names unstandardized. The county's market opened in the spring of 1830, three years before LaPorte existed: Chapman's first entries, 19 April 1830, are Johnston's and Bell's forty acres each in Section 11, Township 38 North, Range 3 East — printed here expressly as not Penn, the county's first, on the township line north of this ground. So Range 4 East's entries of 1830–1833 ran through Crawfordsville (and, for the district's eastern offerings, Fort Wayne); from 12 August 1833 through LaPorte; from 1839 through Winamac. No separate or earlier office served Penn.
Penn's own first entries stand at county-history strength, the strength this section was able to reach: Nathan W. Young's pre-emption, made while the surveyors worked and carrying chain for them (Chapman, p. 790), is the township's first entry act in the books' telling — a pre-emption, the settler's claim staked ahead of the sale. John McKnight, arrived 1834, "entered about 600 acres," his homestead in section 11 (Chapman, p. 827) — the largest Penn entry the books name. What this section could not do is the entry-by-entry pull: the Bureau of Land Management's tract-book search stands behind the same session-gated portal that defeated the survey pull, and the Indiana Digital Archives — which holds the Archives' tract-book indexes for the Fort Wayne, LaPorte–Winamac and Terre Haute–Crawfordsville districts, the pre-August-1833 Penn entries falling to the Crawfordsville-district index — was unreachable at build time. GAP-O1-7 therefore stands, sharpened: the settlers are the BLM General Land Office tract books for Townships 37 North, Ranges 3 and 4 East, read with the two Archives indexes, and the office sequence, the district frame and the books' named entries above are printed so the gap is a door with an address, not a silence.