The state roads, 1832–1833

THE TRANSPORT TRILOGY, FIRST BEAT

The roads came surveyed before the town came platted: the town's published history narrates the locations at full detail — in February 1832 Indiana appointed commissioners to locate a state road from Fort Wayne to South Bend by way of Goshen, the Goshen Road or Old Fort Wayne Road; George Crawford's survey party came through the ground in September 1832, by oxcart, past one cabin between Fort Wayne and Benton Ford; construction followed in the spring of 1833, and much of the road's course out of Osceola toward Fort Wayne is now U.S. 33; and in January 1833 a second location, the Vistula Road toward Toledo, was laid along the river's south bank on what is now Lincolnway East, fording the Baugo at Eagle Point and Stevely's Point, with traffic moving by late 1833. The county histories hold the same roads at a fraction of that detail — Chapman's whole record of the Fort Wayne road is that Crawford's survey "was ordered recorded May 15, 1832" (p. 368), and Howard carries the Vistula road as a state road laid out by special act, its line the old trail through South Bend and Mishawaka (pp. 234–235) — so the survey narrative stands at the town history's strength and the record line at Chapman's, both printed. The surveys fixed the townsite's geometry four years before its plat: an east-west river road and a southeast diagonal, crossing at the creek below the mill dam. Every later carrier of this town — the railroad, the Lincoln Highway, the state highway — inherited the crossing these two surveys made. The road record at full depth is Corridors'; the instruments themselves are printed in Before the City.