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THE GRID LAID OVER THE GROUND
The ground was measured in three campaigns, and the third one's author for this township is a named gap: William Harris ran the line due east from Lake Michigan's southern extremity in June 1817, the line the treaties would call by that year. Eleazer P. Kendrick ran the state line in October 1827 under the Act of Congress of 2 March 1827, setting wooden mile posts to the 105th mile; the county's township surveyors of 1827–1832 were instructed to tie their work to Kendrick's nearest mile post, and one such tie survives in print — William Brookfield's, in the summer of 1829, meeting the state line "742 lks. East of a Hickory Station 6 inches in dia. on the 23 mile from Lake Michigan." For the subdivisions, Howard (p. 157) gives the county's first public surveys to Brookfield in 1829, in "townships 37 and 38, ranges 1 to 3 east," including parts of present Penn — Range 4 East is not in Howard's list, and Brookfield's name cannot be carried into this township on that source, and is not. What Chapman proves for this ground is the work in progress: Nathan W. Young "pre-empted land when the surveyors were at work here, and also carried chain for the Government surveyors" in Penn Township (p. 790) — a settler carrying the chain of the survey that made his own claim describable. The Notre Dame Archives hold the field notes of a survey of the county made in 1829 (an 1858 copy), describing vegetation, swamps, creeks and prairies at section level; those notes were not pulled for this section. NAMED GAP — the deputy surveyor who subdivided Township 37 North, Range 4 East, his contract date and his plat's approval date (and the same for Range 3 East) could not be obtained: the General Land Office's survey search is a session-based application that returns a login redirect to outside queries, and no source reached prints the plat's certificate. The settling sources are the GLO plat images themselves — the plat carries the surveyor's certificate and the Surveyor General's approval date — and the Indiana State Archives' GLO plat maps and field notes for the two townships. Until one is pulled, any surveyor name or approval date for Range 4 East would be invention, and none is printed.