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The register set the floor as a test — the Stokes-and-Shober 1863 class — and the test passes: that map is real, it is this county's, and no earlier county map is named in any catalogue reached. Its full record, from the Library of Congress, which holds it: Map of St. Joseph Co., Indiana, published at Philadelphia by M. W. Stokes in 1863, engraved, printed and mounted by Charles Shober of Philadelphia; entered according to Act of Congress in 1863 by M. W. Stokes in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the District of Indiana; Library of Congress call number G4093.S2G46 1863 .S7, control number 2013593163, catalogued as LC Land Ownership Maps 168. It is a wall map in the full nineteenth-century sense: one map on six sheets, mounted on linen, 131 by 171 centimetres assembled, the sheets 71 by 58 — a map made to hang in a courthouse, a bank or a prosperous farmhouse, not to fold into a pocket.
What it shows is the county at the moment before Lincoln Township existed: a cadastral map — landowners and real property are its Library of Congress subject headings — with a population statistical table, a distance table, and views of residential, public and commercial buildings worked into its margins, the wall map's customary mixture of record and display. Its insets are the county's places as of 1863: Mishawaka, Lakeville, North Liberty, Osceola (catalogued "Oceola"), Terre Coupée, Plainfield, New Carlisle — and W. Troy. The inset list is this town's whole share of the first county map, and it is exact: in 1863 the mapmaker inset West Troy, the 1854 plat at the junction-to-be, and did not inset Walkerton, the 1856 plat seven years old — the older plat, or the one the map's South Bend-centred trade expected its buyers to look for, carried the corner. The town thus enters county cartography inside another place's inset, three years before its township was detached and fourteen before it incorporated.
Two catalogue cautions print with the finding, because this build prints its instruments' noise: the Library of Congress's own citation forms render the map's date once as 1866 in its generated citations while its Created/Published field and its copyright-entry note both give 1863 — the entry note, a fact from the sheet itself, governs, and 1863 stands; and the Indiana State Library's county holdings list carries the same 1863 map with the note "ISL does not own," pointing to the Library of Congress's online image — the state's own catalogue thereby testifying that the first county map's accessible seat is the national library, a fact the working-map article below uses again.
Closure: DUG — first county map named with maker, engraver-printer, place, date, format, contents and this town's inset share; the "first" stands at catalogue strength (no earlier St. Joseph County map in the LOC or ISL records reached).
Sources: Library of Congress, Map of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (Stokes, 1863; Shober), item 2013593163, read whole for this section (names, publication, entry note, genre, tables, views, inset list, medium, call number); Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County maps, atlases and plat books list (1863 entry: property owners indicated; ISL does not own; full image online at LOC); the Story of Walkerton section and Neighborhoods legs of this build (the plats of 1854 and 1856).