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Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago, 1880), 986 pp.; Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing, 1907), 2 vols; Indiana State Library County History Holdings Guide, St. Joseph County
Chapman's 1880 history is the first carrier for the township ground: its Clay Township chapter (pp. 675–681; narrative 675–678, biographies 678–681) carries the first school, the first officers, the mill, and the settler families this build's people fragments rest on. Howard's 1907 history is the deeper book — its Clay chapter (Vol. I, Ch. VIII §7, pp. 283–288) re-reads the township whole, reprints the Lyon mill paper of 1901, and its second volume carries the biographies. Howard names his own predecessors in his preface — "the historical atlas of the county, published, in 1875, by Higgins, Belden & Company… and… that published in the same city, in 1880, by Chapman & Company" — and warns that their settler data was "furnished by men then still living," which is both their value and their limit. What they are good for: the township before 1916, at near-contemporary strength. What they are bad for: the town itself, which did not yet exist; and for exact wording — both are read in this build through machine-generated transcriptions whose own carriers warn "there may be some errors," with the page images (Archive.org; the digitized copies are the Allen County Public Library's) standing as the verification settler. The State Library's holdings guide is the control record for the shelf: Howard at 977.201 S143h (both volumes, also online), Chapman at 977.201 S143, with the printed biographical indexes to both standing beside them.