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1830–1880 · THE COUNTY FRAME AND LINCOLN TOWNSHIP'S FIRST LAW
For the first decades of its existence the Walkerton ground had no law of its own at all, and the frame that governed it is the county's, printed here at boundary size as every build in this county prints it. St. Joseph County was organized in 1830, its government passing to a board of commissioners on January 19, 1831. The first law the record pays for is sheriff's work: Samuel L. Cottrell was paid thirty-two dollars for sheriff's services in September 1831, and Benjamin McCarty stands as sheriff by November of that year. In the same November sitting the commissioners appointed the county's first constables — Lilly, Cissna, Druliner and Garrard, the record preserving one given name imperfectly — and ordered a jail built: the county's first jail, a building ordered as an act of government before it stood as a place, stood at the county seat in South Bend. A felon taken anywhere in what became Lincoln Township went down to that jail and those courts, and for most of the century that was the whole of the law here that left a record.
The township's own first officers are preserved, because Lincoln Township was made late and Chapman prints its making. The territory was part of Liberty Township until petitions presented in June 1866 detached it as an independent township, with Walkerton named as the place of holding its elections. The first election was held in April 1867 at the Walkerton Hotel — 86 votes cast — and it seated the township's petty court and its police in the Indiana form of the day: Neely Frame, justice of the peace, and Zebedee James and Samuel Hudelmyer, constables. At the next election William J. Wolfe and John Carman were elected justices of the peace; the justices standing when Chapman wrote in 1880 were S. J. Nichols and Amos H. Stevison. The justice of the peace heard the township's assaults, debts, strays and liquor cases within walking distance of home; the constable served his process and made his arrests. Indiana kept that system into the 1970s, when the state's court reorganization abolished the justice-of-the-peace courts and folded their work into the county courts. The names of the township's justices and constables between Chapman's 1880 line and the modern record are not preserved in any source reached for this build; the shortfall is printed in the closing article with its settlers, not papered over.
The town's own law dates from incorporation, and incorporation's date carries a conflict this section prints whole rather than resolves. Chapman states that Walkerton was incorporated — and then, in the same breath as the surviving text gives it, that the petitions were presented in 1874 but "by some mistake were not received until 1876," with the year of incorporation itself imperfectly preserved in the digitized text between those two dates. The marshal's course and any town court both date from incorporation whenever exactly it fell in the 1870s, and neither can be honestly opened earlier than the record opens them. No holder of the town marshal's office is named in any source reached for this build before the modern chiefs of the department article below; the town's minute and ordinance books, which appoint each marshal, stand in the closing article as the named settler for the whole roll. No lockup, calaboose or town jail of the town's own stands in the record reached, either; that item is named with the same gap.
Sources: St. Joseph County Commissioners' Record of 1830–1831, as reprinted in the county's 1875 atlas (the sheriff's-services payment, the November 1831 constable appointments and jail order); C. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Lincoln Township chapter (township detached June 1866; first election April 1867 and its officers; the justices standing in 1880; the incorporation passage, with its internal conflict printed as the digitized text preserves it).