The Plats of 1854 and 1856

THE HAND-OFF TO THE SPINE

The ground's pre-town record closes in the order the ground itself presents it: an outwash plain at a marsh's edge, dry where the town would stand and wet for miles west; a river of 2,000 bends bounding its township; a hunting country of the Potawatomi, worked from the river towns, with no village, post or mission on its sections in any record reached; a taking plotted and sustained — the treaty of 26 October 1832, 7 Stat. 394, with no reservation inside the township; a removal that came not with the famous column of 1838, one county south, but in the general Indiana removal of 1840–43; a survey extended over the ground in 1833–34, on the treaty's heels; and a first settlement — Fulmer in the fall of 1835, Wiley by his own account in 1834 — that arrived while the ground's first people were still its neighbors. For twenty years more the ground held only farms, a post office named West York, and Stephens' store. Then the surveyors came back, this time for a railroad: West Troy was platted on 14 December 1854 and Walkerton on 20 June 1856, and the ground had a town on it. The Story of Walkerton section takes the record from the plats.

Sources:

1. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907): land titles (pp. 154–155) and surveys (p. 157) — his four-quarter framework printed as his and tested, not adopted; the pioneers chapter (p. 131) for the Kankakee hunting valley and the Crum's Point road; the Lincoln Township section (pp. 290–291) for the drainage sentence; Campbell's Kankakee survey of 1882, reprinted at pp. 245–252 — read first-hand for this build.
2. The treaty instruments themselves: treaty of 26 October 1832, 7 Stat. 394 (Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. II), Articles I and II read in full and the Article I calls plotted against the townsite's position; treaty of 20 October 1832, 7 Stat. 378, and treaty of 27 October 1832, 7 Stat. 399, tested alongside; Carey Mission treaty, 7 Stat. 317 (20 September 1828). Royce, Indian Land Cessions in the United States, Indiana schedule (cessions Nos. 23 and 24); 41 Ind. Cl. Comm. 399 for Royce Area 177.
3. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880): the Lincoln Township chapter (pp. 733–735) for the thicket townsite and the settlement line, and the Wiley sketch (p. 749) for possession at settlement.
4. United States Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System, feature 2397718 (Walkerton, Indiana): coordinates and elevation. Swamp Land Act of 28 September 1850 and Indiana act of 11 April 1881, as carried in Campbell's survey.
5. The county record at valley strength as settled in the South Bend, Mishawaka, Granger and Osceola legs of this build: the peoples in sequence, Pokagon's exception and Public Law 103-323 (1994), the 1838 column (859 people, 42 dead), and the 1840–43 Indiana removal under Alexis Coquillard — cited to those legs, not retold.