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LEG 25 · ITEM 9 · RUN B #126 · DELTA DF-16 RE-TESTED FROM OPEN SOURCES
The two-strength state, printed whole as charged: this build carries the sale of section 16, Township 37 North, Range 4 East, at two different strengths in two fragments. In Schools the sale is asserted: "the School Commissioners' Record Book No. 1 (p. 30) records the sale of the township's school section, Section 16, on March 21, 1833, at $1.25 an acre, the land endowment that underwrote the district system" — and Schools's source line assigns that whole passage, the Section 16 sale included, to J. Harold Kiracofe's "The History of Osceola, Indiana" (The History Museum; text internally dated January 1968). In The Land the same section's sale is unasserted: "the sale record for this section — its date, its purchaser, its price — stands in the school-land records and is named there as a settler, and no sale date is asserted here," with the school-land sale records for T37N R4E named as settler. One build, one section, two strengths. This article re-tests the item from open sources and closes it at one.
What the re-test could reach, and what it could not. The underlying record — St. Joseph County School Commissioners' Record Book No. 1, p. 30 — is a county manuscript record; it is not published online, and no digitized copy, transcript or second citation of p. 30 was found in any open source searched (county-history texts, Indiana Archives land pages, genealogical transcripts of the county's school-commissioners' records, and the web at large). The 1988 Kiracofe volume, the one source that might repeat or correct the 1968 text, is not reachable online and was not read. The sale therefore cannot be raised to record strength from open sources, and it cannot be lowered either: nothing found contradicts it, and two independent features of the claim check out against the state's own law. First, the machinery: Indiana's school-land system put each congressional township's section 16 in the hands of a county school commissioner selling on the township trustees' subdivision and valuation — exactly the office and book the claim names. Second, the price: Indiana's school-land statute provided that no tract "shall be valued at a less price than one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre," and the surviving trustees' valuations of the period (Shelby County's congressional Township 12 North, Range 6 East, recorded 27 August 1829) price their lowest divisions at exactly $1.25 an acre, with better ground at $1.50 to $3.50. A whole-section sale reported at $1.25 an acre is thus a sale at the statutory floor — the least surprising price the record could carry — though the same fact cuts the other way as corroboration: a floor price is also the figure a retelling could supply from the law alone, and consistency with the statute is not a reading of the book.
Verdict on DF-16, at one stated strength: the sale of section 16 on 21 March 1833 at $1.25 an acre stands at single-source manuscript-citation strength — Kiracofe's 1968 town history citing School Commissioners' Record Book No. 1, p. 30 — neither asserted as record-proven (The Land's caution is sustained) nor discarded (Schools's citation is specific, plausible against the statute, and uncontradicted). Date, price and book-and-page travel together or not at all; the purchaser's name is in no version of the claim and is not supplied here. Settler, unchanged and sharpened: Record Book No. 1 itself, or the Indiana State Archives' school-land sale records for T37N R4E, section 16. One terminus is independent of the manuscript: whatever the sale's date, the section was alienated by 24 April 1856, when William C. Thrall platted a private addition on its east half of the northwest quarter.
The swamp lands inside the plat are accounted for at the strength item 6 leaves them: the 1850 grant made Penn's qualifying wet ground state land in principle; the selections actually made in this township are unpulled, and no acreage, section list or sale is asserted. NAMED GAP — settler: the state's swamp-land selection lists (Indiana State Archives / Auditor of State), read for T37N R4E. The county purchase is the third reserved class, and here a test could be run whole: the county's documented land purchases of the era are its South Bend public-square and courthouse-ground transactions, seated at the county seat; no commissioners' purchase of land in Penn Township — for a county farm, asylum ground or any other county purpose — appears in the county histories, the Notre Dame Archives' catalogue of the county records (1829–1865), or any other open record searched. TESTED NEGATIVE at open-source strength, printed as a search result and not as "never": the settling record, if the negative is ever to be raised, is the St. Joseph County commissioners' record itself.
Verdict, item 9 — MIXED. School lands: closed at one strength (single-source manuscript citation, DF-16 verdict above). Swamp lands: NAMED GAP. County purchase: TESTED NEGATIVE at open-source strength.
Sources: Schools and The Land, read against each other verbatim; Indiana school-land statute text (trustees' valuation, "$1.25 per acre" floor), via the Center for Research Libraries' digitized Indiana laws; Shelby County school commissioners' record transcript (shelbycountyindiana.org), valuations of 27 Aug and 3 Dec 1829; Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records collection finding aid, University of Notre Dame ArchivesSpace (SJO, 1829–1865); Indiana Archives and Records Administration, LaPorte–Winamac Land Office Entries page (in.gov). Searches run 11 Nov 2026. Kiracofe, History of Osceola (1988), NOT read — not reachable online.