Building the road: commissioners, scrip and the South Bend land sale

1830–1837 · THE CONSTRUCTION RECORD

The state built the road the way it paid for everything in 1830 — on land and on credit: The act of 29 January 1830 set the road's physical terms: opened one hundred feet wide, grubbed clear for thirty feet down the center. Noah Noble — soon to be governor — was the first contract commissioner for the southern part; Judge William Polke was commissioner for the north, and it is Polke's northern record that touches South Bend. The money came in slowly and partly in paper: the scrip the commissioners issued between 1830 and 1832 totaled $106,188.53, against land sales that lagged the contracts. In 1832 a sale of the road's granted lands was held at South Bend itself and ran four days — the road paying for itself, in part, out of an auction in a town the road was being built to reach. In 1833 Polke let contracts all along the road to Michigan City. In 1834 the road was divided into three superintendent districts and $26,245.96 in new contracts let; the same year's record carries the complaint that tells the road's real condition — heavy merchandise, salt and other heavy articles, was already being hauled from South Bend southward over the unfinished road, and the traffic was injuring it. A bridge over the Tippecanoe River was contracted for $1,390 in the 1835 report. Polke himself was investigated on charges in 1834–35; the charges were not proved, and he was retained as commissioner for five more years. The road the state got for this money was, by the marker's careful verbs, passable by 1834 and "completed" — the quotation marks are the marker's own — in 1837.

Sources:

1. Joseph C. Prather's construction study of the Michigan Road in the Indiana Magazine of History, drawn from the road commissioners' reports — the act of 29 January 1830 and its hundred-foot/thirty-foot terms, Noah Noble and William Polke, the $106,188.53 of scrip issued 1830–32, the four-day South Bend land sale of 1832, the 1833 contracts to Michigan City, the three superintendent districts and $26,245.96 of 1834 contracts, the Tippecanoe bridge at $1,390, and the unproved charges against Polke.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, Michigan Road marker text — passable by 1834, "completed" in 1837.