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BROOKFIELD'S LIMIT, AND THE EXTENSION AFTER THE TREATY
The survey of this ground waited for the treaty, and then came all at once: Howard's survey record gives the sequence. The county's first surveys, Brookfield's of 1829, covered only the townships already ceded — townships 37 and 38 north, ranges 1 to 3 east (Howard, p. 157). "On the extinguishment of the Indian title to… the southwest quarter… by the treaty of October 26, 1832, the surveys were rapidly extended," and "by the year 1834 practically all the lands of the county were surveyed" (Howard, p. 157). Lincoln Township's block — township 35 north, range 1 west, the townsite's sections 23 and 24 among them — was thus gridded in the extension of 1833–34, within two years of its cession and a year or so before its first settlement: here the paper preceded the people by months, not years, a reversal of the eastern county's order, where settlement had run ahead of both treaty and survey. The survey is the hinge of this section: it converted ceded hunting country into numbered sections a land office could sell, and it fixed the geometry everything later obeyed — the plats of 1854 and 1856 are drawn in its quarter-sections, the railroad plats' descriptions (the northeast quarter of 23, the southwest quarter of 24) are its language, and the roads and the town grid still run on its lines. The surveyors' field notes and the land-office entries at name strength are The Land leg's record; the Story of Walkerton section begins where the survey's grid got its first town.