The grid measured: which sections hold the town, which hold the township

THE PLSS SAMPLED AGAINST THE CENSUS POLYGONS, 11 NOVEMBER 2026

The survey frame is usually asserted; here it is measured. Sampling the town's census polygon against the Bureau of Land Management's CadNSDI Public Land Survey layer, point by point, the town's 1.899 square miles fall about 39 percent in section 24, 23 percent in section 25, 22 percent in section 23, 9 percent in section 26, and 7 percent in section 13, all of Township 35 North, Range 1 West — with a tenth of one percent in section 30 of Township 35 North, Range 1 East, where the town's east edge crosses the Second Principal Meridian itself by a hair. The meridian as surveyed at this latitude runs near longitude −86.466, west of its nominal position, so a town platted in Range 1 West laps a few rods over the line its own descriptions never mention. Lincoln Township's composition is the larger surprise the sample returns: the civil township is not one congressional township but about twenty-two sections of two — sections 1, 2, 3, 10 through 15, 22 through 27, and 34 through 36 of Township 35 North, Range 1 West, together with sections 7, 8, 17, and 18 of Township 35 North, Range 1 East and slivers beyond — because the county's south line, as the act of 16 February 1839 drew it, runs to the center of Township 35 North and then west to the meridian and south again, and the act of 14 January 1850 took a further piece for La Porte County along the Kankakee. The western part of the congressional township lies in La Porte County, whose own Lincoln Township holds it; no boundary change has touched the county since 1850 (Chapman's organization chapter, the acts read in sequence). The survey itself came late to this corner and then all at once: the county's first surveys of 1829 covered only the townships already ceded, and on the extinguishment of the Indian title to the southwest quarter by the treaty of 26 October 1832 "the surveys were rapidly extended," so that by 1834 practically all the county's lands were surveyed (Howard, p. 157). This ground was gridded within two years of its cession and a year or so before its first settlement — the paper preceded the people.