We Don't Actually Know Where the State Line Is. Does It Matter?

How Indiana and Michigan quietly agreed not to care where one ends and the other begins

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED MAY 16, 2024

There's a historical marker on US-31 northbound as you approach South Bend. You've probably never read it before, because pretty much everyone who's ever seen it has been driving past at 60 miles per hour.

But that doesn't mean it's not important.

The marker sits at the place where Indiana's state line used to be, and everything north of that line, including South Bend, Mishawaka, Notre Dame, and Granger...

...used to be a part of Michigan.

At least until they changed it, and left the new state line probably somewhere around the place you think it is today.

In the beginning, the top of Indiana wasn't where it is now. When Congress carved the state out of the Northwest Territory in 1816, its northern border was supposed to be a straight line ten miles south of where it stands today. That would've left Indiana landlocked, staring longingly at Lake Michigan with no shoreline of its own.

That's why the earliest Hoosiers petitioned Congress to expand their borders just enough to get a port on Lake Michigan. To do anything less, they said, would be to doom Indiana to be “just another Kentucky”, and apparently, that was a fate that Congress could wish on no one.

So they nudged the line ten miles north, providing Indiana some 40 miles of shoreline - enough to secure the creation of an Indiana port town at a place ironically called Michigan City.

But here's the thing. Once that new northern boundary was drawn, someone had to physically go out into the woods and mark it. That job fell to a man named John A. Harris, who surveyed the line in 1827. He used the tools of the day - chains, compasses, and a healthy amount of guesswork - and marked the border with wooden posts and blazed trees.

Those markers are now long gone. Rotting in the dirt somewhere, if they even still exist. And since most of Indiana was still being settled from the south up, it took a long time for Hoosiers to actually reach that northern line. By the time they got there, the border Harris had marked was already fading into memory.

This was no big deal for the better part of a century. Counties grew, townships sprouted up, roads were laid. Everyone operated on the assumption that the line was - more or less - where the maps said it was. But as property values rose and jurisdictional lines hardened, the fuzziness started to matter.

The kicker is that Harris's survey wasn't the only one. Over the years, other surveys tried to retrace or reestablish the border, using more modern tools but not always agreeing with each other - or with Harris. Some diverged by a few feet. Others by dozens. And while the original Harris line remains the legal boundary in theory, no one can say with certainty where it lies in real-world terms.

We're not talking about miles of difference. You're not going to wake up and discover South Bend is in Michigan. But a few feet can still matter. A driveway might start in Indiana and end in Michigan, depending on which survey you trust. A farmer could be selling corn in one state while paying property tax in another. One county's 911 dispatcher might get your call, only to hand it off to another across an invisible - and poorly defined - line.

When it comes to Michigan, problems arising from border disputes are not hypothetical. The Wolverine State is no stranger to border drama. There was the infamous Toledo War, a diplomatic slap-fight with Ohio that nearly got bloody over the control of a swampy strip of land. Later, Michigan sparred with Wisconsin over the boundary in the Upper Peninsula, eventually marking the line with concrete posts that still stand today. In both cases, surveys were redone, maps redrawn, and the lines made solid and public.

Given that Michigan has spent so much time, energy, and stress getting its borders properly defined, it's all the more ridiculous that when it comes to Indiana, there's still some uncertainty. It was marked once, badly, and then mostly forgotten. It runs through forests, across rivers, into wetlands, and along backroads where the only marker might be a rusted fencepost or a fading plat map. It's a border maintained by tradition and inertia more than anything else.

And yet, for the most part, it works. Counties have figured out where they think the line is. Utility companies have their maps. Voters get ballots. Life goes on. There have been a few efforts to reestablish the true border, but there's not enough political will to actually get the job done. Maybe that's for the best.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: if someone did go out and do a full-blown, GPS-level, legally binding resurvey of the line, it would cost a fortune. And for what? To tell a handful of people that they now live in a different state? That their taxes are wrong? That their kids are in the wrong school district or that can't smoke weed on their back porch anymore?

At best, a new survey would confirm what everyone already believes. At worst, it would open a bureaucratic can of worms so tangled that even lawyers would struggle to make sense of it. It might be technically satisfying to know where the line really is, but it would be practically disastrous.

It's an invisible line that everyone agrees exists, but few can point to. And until someone finds oil within a thousand feet of it, that's probably how it'll stay.

But for now, we'll let the state line be what it's always been: a best guess. A gentleman's agreement. A memory of a wooden post that nobody remembers, but everyone swears is out there somewhere.

Probably.