The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1830–1831 — the grid, the county, and the 1831 plat
The grid: Ceded land could not be sold until it was surveyed, and the survey that reached this valley was the same federal rectangular survey that Fort Wayne's record carries: townships six miles square off the Second Principal Meridian, the line from which central and northern Indiana is reckoned — the creating act's own boundary description for the new county runs "from range No. 2 west from the second principal meridian" east to Range 3 East and thirty miles south from the state line. The valley's surveys followed the 1828 cession, and by 1831 the townsite sections at the bend were purchasable from the United States. Coquillard and Taylor bought: the East Bank historic context states the transaction flatly — the two men "purchased land from the government in 1831, when it became available after being acquired from the Potowatomi by various treaties," and by then "jointly own[ed] all of the land upon which the original town of South Bend was platted." The individual deputy surveyors of the valley townships are not established in the sources reached; the field notes stand in the General Land Office records, as Fort Wayne's land file logged the same gap for its own townships.
The county and the seat: The ground acquired its American frame the year before the plat. By act of the General Assembly approved 29 January 1830, St. Joseph County was formed — with Elkhart County in the same act — its organized existence to run from 1 April 1830; on 27 August 1830 the county organized itself at the house of Alexis Coquillard, the justices sworn with L. M. Taylor, the trader, as the county's first clerk. The county seat was not at first the bend: the locating commissioners in May 1830 placed it on William Brookfield's farm — the McCartney farm, in German Township, two and a half to three miles northwest — where a paper town was styled St. Joseph. Taylor petitioned against it, and in 1831 the seat was re-located to the village of South Bend; the two county accounts this section follows divide on the day — the 1875 illustrated atlas dates the new commissioners' re-location 12 May 1831, and a later county account gives the choice as 7 September 1831 — and the division is carried here unresolved, as the record stands. What is not divided is the sequence: plat and county seat arrived together, and each made the other permanent.
The plat: In March 1831 Coquillard and Taylor laid out the town. The Story of South Bend gives the day: "on March 28, 1831, they platted the town" — the National Register record states it as the Original Plat of South Bend recorded in 1831, and the East Bank context adds the operative detail: the plat lay all on the west bank of the river, a rough polygon whose irregular eastern edge was the St. Joseph itself, with three principal north–south streets — Michigan, Main and Lafayette — and lots of a quarter acre, a goodly number set aside for public uses. The name on the plat was the post office's name of the year before: South Bend, for the bend in the river that had decided everything else in this section — the portage above it, the fall at it, the villages and posts beside it. The plat is the boundary of this record. Everything before it — ice, river, emergence, village, fort, trader, treaty, exemption, removal — is in the entries above; everything after it is the city's, and the Story of South Bend section of this build tells it from here.
Sources: Chapman (1880) — the creating act's text (approved 29 January 1830), the county's organization (27 August 1830) at Coquillard's house, Taylor as first clerk; Indiana Historical Bureau, Origin of Indiana County Names / Indiana county record — St. Joseph County, date of founding 29 January 1830, organization 1 April 1830; An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — the first seat on the Brookfield farm and the re-location dated 12 May 1831; the county history compilation (Genealogy Trails, from the county histories) — the 7 September 1831 dating, carried as the conflicting account; Brown, The Story of South Bend (1920) — the 28 March 1831 plat; National Register nominations, Historic Resources of Downtown South Bend and the East Bank historic context — the recorded Original Plat, the west-bank polygon, the street plan, the quarter-acre lots, and the 1831 government purchases.