The story
Welcome to Bainbridge Township
Bainbridge Township is quiet orchard country in northern Berrien County, crossed by the old Territorial Road that once carried daily stagecoaches between Detroit and St. Joseph. Its farms were cleared by New Yorkers in the 1830s and by German families from 1841 on, and its apple and peach orchards still give it its character.
Bainbridge covers surveyed Township 4 South, Range 17 West, six miles square, with Watervliet to the north, Pipestone to the south, Van Buren County to the east and Benton to the west. It lies north and east of the St. Joseph River, in the country the Potawatomi ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. Ellis (1880) describes rolling land dotted with ponds, the largest being Pipestone Lake of about 400 acres, and small streams without much water-power. Fox (1924) says the township was surveyed in April 1830.
The first settlers, Ellis says, were a French Canadian family named Sharrai: Bartholomew Sharrai, his wife, five sons and three daughters, who came about 1833 and settled on section 8, dividing their time between their land and boating on the St. Joseph. Another Canadian named Ruleaux put up a log shanty nearby, stocked it with a little whiskey and called it a tavern, and the spot was long known as the ‘Ruleaux Place.’ Coolidge (1906) agrees about the Sharrais but mentions a Wallace Tabor who came from Jefferson County, New York, in 1831, stayed a short time, and returned to settle in 1833.
Read the full story
The Territorial Road between Detroit and St. Joseph was laid out through the middle of the township in 1835, and it made Bainbridge a stagecoach country. Martin Tice, who helped build the road, took land on section 17 beside it, and John P. Davis opened a log tavern across from him. A. R. Pinney, who took over the Davis tavern in 1841, replaced it with a large frame house where, Ellis was told, he sometimes served breakfast to a hundred people in the busy season, until the Michigan Central Railroad drew the traffic away. At the west edge, James H. Enos kept another tavern and in 1836 built a sawmill on Blue Creek at Millburg, the little mill village that lies mostly in Benton but has a few lots in Bainbridge. Enos was the township’s first postmaster.
Much of the land was first owned by Smith & Merrick, New York land dealers. In 1836 seventeen men walked out from Detroit to clear their holdings in the north part of the township; Dr. N. B. Moffatt met them in Bainbridge (Ellis, p. 215; Coolidge, p. 245). A few of them, among them George Wilder, stayed to farm, beside Stillman Wood and Stephen R. Shepard, who were already clearing land there. Joseph Matrau, another of the seventeen, took his unpaid wages in land on section 28 in 1839 and, in 1843, carried twelve apple trees home on his back from Eli Ford’s place near Berrien Springs to start his first orchard. Coolidge credits David Byers, who came from Livingston County, New York, in 1836, with bringing a hundred peach trees from New York in 1840; their first crop, forty bushels in 1843, sold at St. Joseph for a hundred dollars.
The German Settlement in the north part of the township was founded in 1841 by eight families, among them Michael and Peter Humphrey, Jacob and Daniel Kreiger, Peter Schmitberger, Christian Heffner and Jacob Kniebes, who had come from Germany to Cincinnati the year before and answered Smith & Merrick’s advertisements. A second colony came directly from Germany in 1846, Ellis says (p. 220); Coolidge gives 1847. Coolidge calls it the earliest German settlement in the county and estimates that half of Bainbridge was of German ancestry by 1906. By 1880 the settlement had four churches within half a mile of each other: Evangelical Lutheran (about 1851), Evangelical (1856), Roman Catholic St. Mary’s (church built 1860) and German Baptist (1871). In the southwest, a colony of eighteen families from Jefferson County, New York, arrived in 1844, and a union church was built at Spink’s Corners in 1869.
Bainbridge was set off from St. Joseph Township in 1837 and held its first township meeting on April 3, 1837, when J. B. Ransom was elected supervisor and J. H. Enos clerk. For a few years its jurisdiction also covered what became Pipestone (1842) and Watervliet (1846). It has always been farm country; Ellis called it entirely given over to agriculture, and Coolidge noted that most farmers had peach orchards of five to twenty acres. The 2020 census counted 2,682 people in the township.