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LEG 25 · ITEM 6 · RUN B #125 · THE CANAL GRANT, THE MICHIGAN ROAD GRANT, AND THE SWAMP GRANT, TESTED AGAINST T37N R4E
Indiana stood as landowner over this ground three times on paper, and the three grants must be separated, because only one of them was ever geographically capable of taking a Penn Township acre: the canal grant of 1827, the Michigan Road grant of 1826–27, and the swamp grant of 1850. The canal and road grants are dug whole below and tested negative for this township on their own calls. The swamp grant is the live one — a township carrying Chapman's mile-wide marsh was selection ground under it — and its Penn selections remain a named gap, with the settler named.
The canal grant first. By the act of 2 March 1827 (4 Stat. 236), Congress granted Indiana, to aid a canal uniting the Wabash River with Lake Erie, "a quantity of land equal to one half of five sections in width on each side of said canal, and reserving each alternate section to the United States" — a checkerboard five miles wide on each side of a line that was afterwards located from the Maumee through Fort Wayne and down the Wabash valley. The grant's own geometry is its boundary: its selections could only lie within that ten-mile band in the state's northeast and central corridor. No part of the band approaches St. Joseph County, and no canal was ever located, surveyed or dug in or near Penn Township. Tested negative: no Wabash & Erie canal land ever stood inside Township 37 North, Range 4 East, and no canal-grant acre ever entered the Osceola plat. The "local equivalent" the checklist asks for is therefore not a canal at all — it is the road grant.
The Michigan Road grant is this county's real state-as-landowner instrument, and its text is a treaty before it is a statute. By Article 2 of the Treaty of Mississinewa (16 October 1826, 7 Stat. 295), the Potawatomi ceded "a strip of land, commencing at Lake Michigan, and running thence to the Wabash river, one hundred feet wide, for a road, and also, one section of good land contiguous to the said road, for each mile of the same," with a like section for each mile of the road's continuation through Indianapolis to the Ohio River, the sections to be applied by Indiana's General Assembly to making the road. Congress confirmed the grant to the state by the act of 2 March 1827. The road was afterwards located through South Bend — west of Penn Township — and the state selected its per-mile sections along the located line. That the selection machinery worked exactly as the treaty wrote it, in this county, is proven by a title record on this valley's own ground: a South Bend abstract of title recites the 1826 cession and the 1827 act, and records that Section 1, Township 37 North, Range 2 East — two ranges west of Osceola — "was among the land so selected" as Michigan Road land, the selections confirmed by the act of 2 March 1831 and patented by the United States to Indiana on 14 August 1835. How grant land entered a plat, where it did enter, is visible in that one recital whole: cession, congressional confirmation, state selection, federal patent to the state, then sale by the state for the road fund. For Penn Township the same record runs the other way: the located road never crossed the township, no Michigan Road selection in Township 37 North, Range 4 East appears in any record reached, and The Land's passing line — the 1826 grant "crossed the county west of Penn" — stands confirmed at full strength. Tested negative for T37N R4E.
The swamp grant is the third instrument, and the only one whose Penn Township footprint is still open. By the Swamp Land Act of 28 September 1850 (9 Stat. 519), Congress granted Indiana its swamp and overflowed lands, on condition the proceeds fund the levees and drains to reclaim them; Indiana regulated the sale by the act of 29 May 1852 (1 R.S. 1852, p. 471), under which the county auditor and treasurer sold the state's swamp lands at not less than $1.25 an acre. A township whose largest single early feature is the marsh Chapman describes at full length — three-quarters of a mile to two miles wide, running "almost the entire length of the township" (The Land prints the passage whole) — was prima facie selection ground, and selections, if made, would have been state land standing inside the plat until the state sold them. But selection is a list, not an inference, and no published selection list for this township was reached in open sources: the state's swamp-land selection records were not among the records this section could pull, and the honest closure is a gap with an address, not a marsh converted into a selection by argument.
Verdict, item 6 — MIXED. DUG: the state-as-landowner machinery whole — canal grant (2 March 1827), Michigan Road grant (treaty of 16 October 1826, confirmed 2 March 1827), swamp grant (28 September 1850; Indiana sale act 29 May 1852) — with the entry-into-plat sequence proven on a Range 2 East selection in this county. TESTED NEGATIVE: no canal-grant or Michigan Road grant land in T37N R4E. NAMED GAP: the swamp-land selections actually made inside Penn Township — settler: the Indiana State Archives' swamp-land selection lists and the Auditor of State's swamp-land records for St. Joseph County, read township by township.
Sources: Treaty with the Potawatomi, 16 Oct 1826, Art. 2 (7 Stat. 295), via Oklahoma State University treaty library; Act of 2 Mar 1827 (4 Stat. 236), text as reported in House Rep. No. 84, 26th Congress (govinfo.gov); Barnhart & Carmony summary and the Michigan Road article, Indiana Magazine of History LXXXIII (Sept 1987), via ScholarWorks; South Bend abstract of title No. 9968 (docs.southbendin.gov), reciting the selection of Sec. 1, T37N R2E and the U.S. patent to Indiana of 14 Aug 1835; Swamp Land Act of 28 Sept 1850 (9 Stat. 519) and Indiana Act of 29 May 1852, both as construed in Tolleston Club v. Lindgren, 39 Ind. App. 448 (1906); The Land, marsh and treaties-that-did-not-touch articles. Searches run 11 Nov 2026.