Project Scroll Research Note 2026-48: Three thousand dollars, not ten: the act of 3 March 1825 for the Chicago Road through White Pigeon

The county history of St. Joseph County, Michigan (1877), says that in 1825 Congress "ordered the survey of a highway one hundred feet wide, for military purposes, between Detroit and Chicago, and appropriated ten thousand dollars to complete the same." The act itself, chapter 120 of the second session of the 18th Congress, approved 3 March 1825, authorized three commissioners to "explore, survey, and mark" a road from Detroit to Chicago and appropriated "the sum of three thousand dollars" to pay them and their assistants. It says nothing of a width of one hundred feet. The ten thousand dollars belongs to the act printed just above it in the Statutes at Large, chapter 114 of the same day, for "surveying and making a road from Little Rock, to Cantonment Gibson, in the territory of Arkansas." Project Scroll Research Note 2026-48, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-48/.