The story
Welcome to Baroda
Baroda grew up around a railroad station that Michael B. Houser brought to his land in 1890. When the Post Office Department would not name the office after a living man, Houser chose the name of a city in India, and the village has carried it ever since. It is a small farm town whose main street still keeps some of its original buildings.
The village stands in what was the eastern part of Lake Township, ground that Ellis (1880) and Coolidge (1906) describe as dry, fertile clay loam settled by farm families from the 1830s on. It was Potawatomi land until the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Before the railroad there was no village here; Coolidge’s census table gives all of Lake Township 1,247 people in 1880.
In 1889, Coolidge writes, a railroad was built from South Bend through Galien, Glendora and Baroda to St. Joseph. It was first called the Vandalia road and later the Three I, its corporate name being the Indiana, Illinois and Iowa Railroad, and by 1906 it had become a branch of the Michigan Central. Michael B. Houser, a Lake Township farmer who had served as supervisor in 1878, owned the land where the station was placed. Fox (1924), on the word of W. C. Babcock, says the village was laid out when the line was completed. The Village of Baroda’s history says Houser negotiated for the station, gave a free lot to anyone who would put up a store or shop worth $500 or more, and sold house lots for $35.
Read the full story
Houser wanted the post office called Houser, Fox says, but the Post Office Department ‘frowned on the giving of the names of living men to its offices,’ so he named it Baroda after the city in India, and the village took its name from the post office. The village’s own account says instead that Houser did not wish to have the town named for himself. Wikipedia gives January 1, 1891, as the opening of the Baroda post office.
By the early 1900s Baroda had the businesses of a busy farm town. The Baroda City Mills, a three-story flour mill with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, was bought by Henry K. Nold in 1899. A general store run by Parrish and Corrigan of Stevensville opened a branch here and was kept by Parrish until 1900. Baroda Lodge No. 435 of the Odd Fellows met in the village, there was a Congregational church, and by 1906 the Feather family’s telephone line through Oronoko and Lake had an office at Baroda. Dr. Louis A. King, who settled here in 1903, found his German useful, for Coolidge says much of the new immigration into Lake Township was German.
In 1906 Coolidge listed Baroda as one of Lake Township’s two villages, ‘neither of which is incorporated.’ The village was incorporated in 1907, and in 1923 the eastern part of Lake Township around it was set off as Baroda Township. The 2020 census counted 875 people in the village.