The story
Welcome to Baroda Township
Baroda Township is the newest township in Berrien County, set off from Lake Township in 1923. Its farms lie on the higher, well-drained ground east of the old Big Meadow swamp, the first part of old Lake Township to be settled, and its center is the village of Baroda, which grew up around a railroad station in 1890.
The land of Baroda Township lies west of the St. Joseph River in Potawatomi country ceded to the United States at the Carey Mission treaty of September 20, 1828. Until 1923 it formed the eastern part of Lake Township, which itself was part of Oronoko until 1846. Ellis (1880) and Coolidge (1906) describe old Lake as divided by the ‘Big Meadow,’ a swamp several miles wide running from southwest to northeast; the eastern sections near the Oronoko line were dry, rich clay loam and were settled first, while the land west of the meadow filled in only after 1850.
Both historians name John Harner as the first settler. He took land on section 25 near the Oronoko line about 1834 or 1835 and was still living there in 1880, with his sons Michael, John and Levi nearby. Horace Godfrey, one of the founders of Berrien Springs, later farmed on the same section. Benjamin Lemon settled on section 24 in 1842, Bradley M. Pennell on section 24 about 1843, and the Heathman, Hinman and Shafer families on section 25 in the mid-1840s. Godfrey Boyle, a German who had served in the campaigns against Napoleon, took government land in Lake about 1836 or 1837, according to Coolidge.
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The first Lake Township election, held in April 1846 at Benjamin Lemon’s house in this eastern neighborhood, drew eighteen votes; Bradley M. Pennell was elected supervisor. Ellis, however, says in his Buchanan chapter that Edward Ballengee, living in Lake in 1845, was ‘foremost in getting that town set off, and was its first supervisor.’ The first church in the township, a Methodist society, was organized in 1846 at a schoolhouse in the southeast part of Lake. The population of all of Lake was 557 in 1860; Ellis gives 1,006 for 1870, and Coolidge’s census table 1,247 for 1880.
Growth came with the railroad. In 1889, Coolidge says, a line was built from South Bend through Galien, Glendora and Baroda to St. Joseph, first called the Vandalia road and later the Three I. Michael B. Houser, who had served as Lake’s supervisor in 1878, owned the land where a station was placed, and the village of Baroda was laid out around it. Coolidge wrote in 1906 that immigration had begun to ‘pour in’ about 1890, much of it German, that land prices had more than doubled in ten years, and that Lake led all townships in strawberries.
Lake Township then had two growing villages, Bridgman on the lakeshore and Baroda inland. Wikipedia says tensions between the two communities led to Baroda Township being split off from Lake in 1923; the Village of Baroda’s own history gives 1923 as the year the township was organized. It remains a largely rural township around the village. The 2020 census counted 2,835 people in Baroda Township, including the village.