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Three classes of land inside this township never went through the La Porte office's ordinary cash sale, and each is accounted for here at the strength its record allows. The school section first, because it is the oldest reservation on the ground. From the Land Ordinance of 1785 forward, lot — section — sixteen in every township was reserved from sale for the maintenance of public schools in that township, and Indiana's enabling terms carried the grant in the form this build's record quotes: section sixteen in every township granted to the inhabitants of the township for the use of schools, with other lands equivalent and most contiguous granted where section sixteen had already been sold or disposed of. The section was therefore the township's own endowment, not the federal government's to sell at La Porte: it was administered and in time sold under state authority through the county — the county commissioners and auditor conducting school-land sales, the proceeds going to the county school fund — which is why, as with the swamp sections in the article above, no federal patent for section sixteen will be found in the GLO record. This township adds a complication the plat makes unavoidable, and it is printed because a single "section 16" answer would be wrong for Lincoln Township: the civil township, formed in 1866, is composed of parts of two congressional townships — the larger part of Township 35 North, Range 1 West, and sections 7, 8, 17 and 18 of Township 35 North, Range 1 East, as the banked Land leg's measured composition states — so the school-land account for the civil township runs on two section sixteens, one in each range, each granted against its own congressional township. Which subdivisions of either section sixteen were leased, which sold, to whom, and when, is the county's school-land record — the commissioners' record and auditor's school-land books at the county seat, with the State Auditor's reports behind them — and that item-level account is a named gap from this seat, its settler named. The county purchase class, second, is thinner still on this ground: no banked article and no record reached for this item shows the county itself purchasing land inside the townsite sections — for a poor farm, a fairground, or any other county purpose seated in Lincoln Township — and the honest print is the negative at pointer size, its settler the same commissioners' record that settles the school section. The swamp sections, third, are accounted for in the companion article above and are cross-referenced, not retold: state-selected under the Act of 1850, sold by state patent under the Act of 1852, invisible to the federal tract books by design.
Sources: Land Ordinance of 1785 reservation of lot 16, and the Indiana enabling-act school grant in its quoted form, as carried in the Indiana Supreme Court reports and the state's annual reports (books.google.com extracts of Reports of Cases, vols. 2 and 6, and Annual Reports of the Officers of State, 1854); county administration of school-land sales and the county school fund, on the Shelby County school-commission lands record as the Indiana pattern's documented instance (shelbycountyindiana.org) — pattern evidence, printed as pattern, not as this township's sale record; Lincoln Township's two-range composition: The Land, art. "The grid measured" (BLM CadNSDI sample, 11 Nov. 2026), banked. Swamp sections: the preceding article and its sources.