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1875 county atlas, Clay Township footnote (p. 62) and directory (p. 91); Howard (1907) I, p. 284
Menzo Webster came from Monroe County, New York, and settled in 1834 on Section 23, Township 38 North, Range 2 East — the section the town of Roseland now in part occupies. He is the first holder of the townsite ground the record names, and he held it long: the 1875 atlas directory, forty-one years after his settling, still lists him on the section, a farmer, with a South Bend post office. Howard's settler list carries his name without addition. Nothing more of the man is in the county books — no biography was taken for Chapman, no sketch stands in Howard's second volume, and his later course and death are not in the record reached; the 1875 atlas map plate, which would show his name on the section in the atlas's own hand, stands as an image settler in the pass note (G-LD-7). He prints here at the size the record gives: the man who farmed the townsite for at least four decades, in whose tenure the ground passed from ceded land to a settled farm — and under whose section number, though two generations later, a town would vote itself into being.