Drawing the Line: Indiana / Michigan in 1827

How surveyors carved a border line with chains, axes, and crude maps nearly two centuries ago... and why their line remains legally binding.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

I don't know how this town wound up here, and I'm less certain how I came to be standing in the middle of it, one foot in Michigan and the other in Indiana. I had to drive here to see it for myself because so far as I can tell, Google doesn't even know about this place yet. At least their street view cars have yet to make a visit.

This is Ray, Indiana.

Or Ray, Michigan.

Depends where you're standing. Also depends on when you're standing there.

Take Bob Harrington, a resident of Ray who lived on the Indiana side for decades until a survey and assessment moved him into Michigan without ever needing a moving truck. Harrington's a Michigander now, paying Michigan taxes, voting in Michigan elections, and carrying a Michigan driver's license.

That last one was a headache for a while, and during a particularly confusing battle with a slow and muddled interstate bureaucracy that was probably just as confused as he was, Harrington's Michigan driver's license had an Indiana address on it.

To understand how that happens, we have to go all the way back to 1827.

Legal borders are always confusing. Legislatures have struggled with them since the beginning, and they were a particular headache to the men in Washington during the years when American expansion was hungry to claim new land faster than the politicians could account for it. They had no choice but to pass laws and regulations marking the edges of lands they hadn't seen and that had only begun to be explored.

There were no maps in the territorial bills that came out of the Congress. No GPS coordinates either. Instead, everything had to be written and described in paragraph form. In some places, a border might be described as being a few miles north of a certain large rock. In other places, a border might be placed as a north-south line a “two-days journey” from an undefined fork in an undefined river.

At least once, a border was defined by a specific oak tree in a grove filled with them. To make clear the requirements of the border, the mapmakers measured the circumference of the tree to the tenth of an inch so that later surveyors could locate exactly the point they had referenced. When those surveyors returned several years later, they were unable to ascertain the original border even after measuring every tree in the grove, because, as they are wont to do, the trees had grown.

The case of the Indiana-Michigan border came with some of the same kinds of confusion, but in theory, the law provided an easier description of the border. Originally, it was a straight east-west line from the southern tip of Lake Michigan. A few years later, it was changed to the same definition that holds today: a straight east-west line exactly ten miles north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

The only catch is that when they passed that bit of legislation, they still thought Lake Michigan was here:

Clearly, this map is an abomination, but it's what they had at the time, and they did their best with what they had. A few years later, the cartographers got it much closer to being right, and in 1827, it was time for a proper survey of the state line with a proper understanding of where Lake Michigan actually was.

Elihu P. Kendrick was the man for the job, and he set out with a compass, a chain, and a crew of men to decide for permanence and posterity where one state began and where the other one ended.

It's important to realize that while a Congressional Act describes a border, it's the work of a surveyor that defines it. The work of the surveyor creates a legally binding border that cannot be changed — even if it is found to be in error — unless both states agree to resurvey the line.

The rationale is simple enough. You don't want to find out you've been moved to another state because a century later someone uncovered a math error in a dead surveyor's notebook. So when Kendrick finished his work and the authorities signed off on it, that meant that the State Line was wherever he said it was.

Two centuries later, surveyors are still trying to figure out exactly where that was.

Before he measured anything, Kendrick had a difficult decision to make, one that hadn't been spelled out as precisely in the Congressional border bill as it probably should have been.

Where, exactly, is the southern tip of Lake Michigan?

Is it measured from furthest edge of the water, spilling out onto the sand from a lake that famously ebbs and flows with the tides? Is it measured at high tide or low tide? Which way is the wind blowing?

The tide can change the exact position of lake dozens of feet in a day and hundreds across a pair of centuries. That means that our state line isn't really defined as a line ten miles north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Instead, it's defined as a line ten miles north of wherever Elihu P. Kendrick decided the southern tip of Lake Michigan was in the summer of 1827.

Fortunately, we have his notes.

Kendrick chose as his starting point a spot that had already been chosen — ten years earlier by a surveyor called William Harris in June 1817. The southern tip of Lake Michigan had been then — and would from that point forward officially be — near “an aspen 9 inches in diameter and an aspen 12 inches in diameter.”

With that bit settled, all Kendrick had to do was find the point along the shore of Lake Michigan exactly ten miles north of those two unspectacular trees and carve a line due east from there. Even with the technology of the time, this was a doable task. Humans have been able to survey mileslong straight lines since the Roman times.

Kendrick did have to deal with a handful of difficulties along the way that might have complicated his work: swamps, wetlands, the occasional river crossing. But we have every reason to believe that he did a pretty good job tracing his line. His men blazed the border, cutting down trees that described his line and pounding wooden markers into the ground every mile. According to the paperwork, one of those markers is practically in my backyard, but I've never seen it.

I have, spread out on my dining room table, the collected efforts of a dozen local surveyors — on both sides of the border — who are trying to settle the border confusion once and for all. It's an impressive bit of work, a thick binder filled with color maps that interpret Kendrick's notes and attempt to locate where each of his mile markers used to be. If there's any hint of any of those markers remaining, this binder is the treasure map to finding them.

There's no political will — nor reason — to try to change the border. Doing so would require the agreement of both states, something that's unlikely given that any change would mean one of the states losing something. Instead, there's a desire to better understand and define the existing border.

That's what happened in Ray. When surveyors better interpreted the official maps that already existed, they realized that at least one house was in a different state than had been thought. There's a lot that goes into making a tough call like that one, but the generally accepted rule of thumb is that if a home straddles a border, it's the location of the front door that creates an address.

I don't know if there are too many front doors that will change hands if and when the Kendrick line is fully recalled and remembered. The surveyors I've talked to don't expect too many.

But they're quick to point out that right now is the best time to sort all of that out once and for all. It's during the quiet times that it makes the most sense to finalize an issue like a border, not during the fraught moments when a fortunate family strikes oil, when a man is shot at the boundary, or when a neighbor challenges your right to vote in a state.

“It's probably fine the way it is,” said one surveyor. “Right up until the moment it suddenly isn't. We can solve this before we have a problem with it. It will be so much worse if we wait until after.”