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Before the City banked one sentence — the valley's lands were granted to the state as swamp lands under the Act of 28 September 1850 — and this item asked which sections of Township 35 North, Ranges 1 West and 1 East, the state actually took, and how grant land entered the plats. The machinery is dug and prints at full strength. By the Swamp Land Act of 28 September 1850 (9 Stat. 519), the federal government granted each state its swamp and overflowed lands, the proceeds to fund the levees and drains that would reclaim them; the state selected its lands, the selections were approved and patented to the state, and Indiana then sold them itself. Indiana's implementing act of 29 May 1852 — "an act to regulate the sale of the Swamp Lands donated by the United States to the State of Indiana, and to provide for the Draining and reclaiming thereof" — made the county auditor and county treasurer the state's selling agents, directed the Auditor of State to prepare maps or plats of each county's swamp lands and forward them to the county auditor, and put the lands up at public auction at the courthouse in legal subdivisions at not less than a dollar and a quarter an acre, with pre-emption claimants who had settled before 1 January 1852 entitled to enter at that price. The neighboring county's working of the same machinery is documented at first hand and shows the course this township's selections would have followed: Marshall County's auditor advertised its swamp lands — expressly including lands in Township 35 North, Range 1 East, the range whose western sections form part of Lincoln Township's own composition — for sale at Plymouth beginning 8 August 1853, and reported 8,497 acres disposed of for 10,809 dollars within the sale's first days. Two consequences for the plats follow and are stated plainly. First, swamp land never passed through the federal land office at all: there is no federal patent for it in the General Land Office records, because title ran United States to State to buyer by state patent, recorded at the Indiana State Archives — a researcher who looks for this township's wet sections in the federal tract books will not find them, and their absence there is the grant working as designed, not a gap in the federal record. Second, grant land entered the township plats as ordinary private parcels once the state patent issued — indistinguishable on a later plat from a federal cash entry, its swamp origin recoverable only from the state-patent books. What this article cannot print is the item's core list: which sections and subdivisions of T35N R1W and R1E were selected for St. Joseph County, on what dates they were patented to the state, and to whom the state first sold them. The General Land Office portal, tried for this item, answers a text read with its loading screen only, and in any event holds no swamp patents; the selection lists and state patents themselves are the Indiana State Archives' swamp-land records — the Auditor of State's selection lists and the swamp-land patent books, the latter now partly in transcription in the Archives' FromThePage swamp-land patents project. That record, read at Indianapolis or through the Archives' own database, is the named settler for the township list, and the list is carried as a named gap until it is read.
Sources: Swamp Land Act of 28 Sept. 1850 (9 Stat. 519), as stated in Tolleston Club v. Lindgren, 39 Ind. App. 448 (1906), summarizing the federal grant and the Indiana act of 29 May 1852 (1 R.S. 1852, p. 471) — sale machinery, county auditor and treasurer as agents, Auditor of State plats, $1.25 minimum; Marshall County swamp-land sale notice, The Banner (Plymouth), 6 May / 4 Aug. 1853, and sales report, 18 Aug. 1853, transcribed at the Marshall County original-landowners page (sites.rootsweb.com/~inmarsha/swamp.html) — T35N R1E named among the sale townships; Indiana State Archives' land-records pages (in.gov/iara) for the state-patent custody of swamp and canal lands, restated in the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society's early-land-sales index; Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office portal (glorecords.blm.gov), tried 11 Nov. 2026 — returned its loading screen only.