First entries and the settler ground

WHAT THE LAND OFFICE SOLD, AND WHAT THE RECORD NAMES

The county's first land entries are not this township's, and the distinction is the finding. Chapman prints the county's first entries from the tract books: on 19 April 1830, John Johnston entered the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of section 11, Township 38 North, Range 3 East, and Samuel Bell the southeast quarter of the southwest quarter of the same section — the St. Joseph River country at the county's northeast, two townships and four ranges from this ground. Lincoln Township's land came to market later, behind its treaty: the ground was ceded on 26 October 1832, surveyed by 1834, and its sale ran through the La Porte land office, whose first sale the county frame dates to 12 August 1833. The entry-by-entry roster for Township 35 North, Ranges 1 West and 1 East — who entered which quarter-section, and when — could not be pulled: the General Land Office's records are session-gated to this build, and the roster's settlers are named here at their full strength, the Bureau of Land Management's tract books for the two townships and the Indiana Archives' La Porte–Winamac land-office indexes. What the county histories do name is the settlement itself, at settler strength. Chapman gives the township's first settlement to the fall of 1835 — Christian Fulmer and family — and Thomas H. Wiley's arrival to the spring of 1836; Wiley's own account, carried in the county record, puts his coming in 1834 or 1835 and his nearest neighbors still Potawatomi. The 1875 atlas's Lincoln Township page adds the section-level roster five years nearer the events: Philo Ruggles came in 1836 and settled in Walkerton; Joshua Cole and his son Alvah H. came in 1837 and settled on section 23 — land that one Dunham had leased of Treadway before Cole bought, a lease running ahead of the purchase in the usual frontier order; Washington Fuson, Thomas Barton, Archibald Goit, and Mr. Weir were in before 1837; Harden Wiley settled on section 18, between Walkerton and North Liberty, and the family of Samuel Lorens at the same time and place; Charles and Jackson Usher settled on section 25, "among the first"; Morris Frost erected the township's first sawmill in the fall of 1837. The ground these men entered was the plain's dry edge and the sections around it — the townsite's sections 23 and 24 among them — bought out of the survey of 1833–34, in the decade when the marsh beside them was still a hunting country and the people who hunted it were still, in Wiley's phrase, his near neighbors.