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The La Porte office is documented at the strength the Archives itself prints; the entry-by-entry roster for the townsite sections is not reachable from this seat, and this article prints both facts without borrowing strength from one to cover the other. The office first. The Indiana Archives' own account of its LaPorte–Winamac Land Office Entries, 1833–1855, states: an additional land office opened at LaPorte in 1833, six years before its removal to Winamac in 1839; its district embraced all or part of nineteen present counties, St. Joseph among them; a significant portion of the district — some 500,000 acres purchased — had previously been offered through the Crawfordsville and Fort Wayne offices, and those sales are not in the LaPorte–Winamac records, a caution that governs any roster built from them; the first sale in the new district took place on 12 August 1833, the date the banked Land leg already carries; the office closed 31 January 1855, unsold lands passing to the Indianapolis office, and on that office's closure the records passed to the State Auditor and thence to the Indiana State Archives. The entry process, from the Archives' land-records history: in each district the office was staffed by a Register, who recorded the status of each tract, and a Receiver, who recorded payment; a purchaser examined the plat book, entered his choice in the tract book — arranged by township, each entry under its legal description, with the purchaser's name and the date — then paid the Receiver, who entered the transaction chronologically with receipt number, name, and most often the purchaser's residence; full payment earned the patent that closed the title. The Archives has built the office's survival into a database of 48,562 records in twelve fields — purchaser, residence, date, legal description among them — from the tract books, spelling variants unamended. That database, in the Indiana Digital Archives, is the settler for this item's question: the first buyers, named, of sections 13, 23, 24, 25 and 26, Township 35 North, Range 1 West. It could not be read from this seat: the Digital Archives search is an interactive database that returns nothing to a text fetch, and the Bureau of Land Management's GLO portal, the federal parallel, likewise returned only its loading screen when tried on 11 November 2026.settlement record, from Chapman and the 1875 atlas, not the entry record. Settlement followed entry, sometimes by years and sometimes through an intermediate buyer; to print the settlers as the first buyers would invent the very fact this item exists to settle. The roster is carried as a named gap: Indiana Digital Archives, LaPorte–Winamac tract-book database, queried by township and section, with the BLM tract books for T35N R1W behind it.
Sources: Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "LaPorte-Winamac Land Office Entries 1833–1855" and "Land Records" (in.gov/iara), read 11 Nov. 2026 — office dates, district, 500,000-acre caution, first sale 12 Aug. 1833, closure 31 Jan. 1855, 48,562-record database, Register/Receiver process; Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office portal (glorecords.blm.gov), tried 11 Nov. 2026 — loading screen only. Settlement names: Chapman (1880) and Higgins, Belden & Co. atlas (1875), art. "First entries and the settler ground" — cited here to mark the boundary, not as entry evidence.