Pine Creek and the township's own water

THE ONE NAMED STREAM ON THE TOWNSITE'S GROUND

The townsite's own drainage runs north, on a creek the 1875 atlas draws by name. The plat of West Troy in Higgins, Belden & Co.'s 1875 atlas carries "Pine Creek" lettered along the village's north edge, running east–west above Washington and Main streets before the ground falls toward the Kankakee system — the creek is the townsite's one named watercourse, the local collector that carries the combined plats' runoff, and the township's farm drainage with it, northward out of the town into the Kankakee drainage. The legal machinery that keeps such water moving is the county drainage code: under Indiana's drainage law (Indiana Code 36-9-27), regulated drains are established on petition, classified and maintained by the county surveyor under the county drainage board, with a seventy-five-foot right of way measured from a tile drain's center line or an open drain's banks. Which of Lincoln Township's ditches stand on the county's regulated-drain list today, and under what names and establishment dates, is a record this history could not reach at item strength; the county surveyor's regulated-drain register is the named settler for the township's ditch-by-ditch course, and the gap is carried in this build's note rather than filled from the map alone. What the map does settle is the pattern: a township ditched farm by farm from the 1880s, its natural creek at the townsite's north edge, and its water bound for a river that was itself made into a ditch within living memory of the men who platted the town.