The land today: a farmed township around a railroad townsite

LAND USE AT THE PRESENT VINTAGE

The drainage era's outcome is the present landscape. Lincoln Township today is the reclaimed marsh's eastern head in its working form: an overwhelmingly farmed township of corn and soybean ground on the ditched outwash plain, its section-line roads running on the 1833–34 survey, its county parcel record counting 1,631 parcels tagged to the township in the county assessor's land-records layer. The town inside it holds 1,321 parcels within the envelope of its census polygon — 1,354 carry a Walkerton postal address in the same layer, the difference being the township fringe the mail route serves in Lincoln Township and across the county line in Starke County, since the 46574 delivery area is a postal fact and this build seats every fact on ground, never on ZIP. The marsh's other economy — the sporting one, the duck and muskrat wealth that made it, in Howard's phrase, for so many years "the paradise of the fowler" before "the process of drainage and fencing has robbed the region of its original charm" — died with the water, and the land's present use is the drainage era's ledger balanced: the Maumee description's own use line for the drained marsh-margin soils is corn, soybeans, and wheat, "many areas that are drained are irrigated," and by the state's 1990 count less than one percent of the watershed's streams remained in natural condition. The marsh itself survives in its managed remnants downstream — the state fish and wildlife areas on the lower Kankakee in Starke and Jasper counties are the largest of them — and in the river's continuing management under the 2019 basin commission; on this township's ground it survives as soil: the black muck in the bottoms, the peat in the section lines' low corners, and a water table the ditches still argue with every wet spring. The townsite's own acres remain what the survey made them — 1.899 square miles, all land, no water, at the 2020 census vintage — the dry edge from which the whole township's land story is told.

Sources: cited in the text throughout this section; the build's consolidated source record — with this section's citation practice measured — stands in the Sources leg.