The story
Welcome to Benton Heights
Benton Heights is a residential community in Benton Charter Township on the east side of Benton Harbor. Known in the mid-twentieth century as Euclid Center, its residents voted in 1957 to take a name that tied it to the neighboring city. With more than 3,600 people, it is one of the larger unincorporated communities in the county.
Benton Township 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. Orville Coolidge (1906) notes that the treaty reserved six sections in Benton, St. Joseph and Sodus townships to the children of the trader William Burnett and his wife Kawkema, sister of the Potawatomi leader Topinabee.
Franklin Ellis (1880) says the township was named on March 11, 1837, for Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri. It is surveyed township 4 south, range 18 west, watered by the Paw Paw River and by Blue and Ox creeks. Settlement came slowly: Jehiel Enos, who had helped survey the country between the St. Joseph and the lake, became the first settler in 1834, and in 1840 the township still had only 237 people. Among the pioneers who followed were Benjamin Johnson, a blacksmith who settled on the Territorial Road in 1837, and the Pearl and Jakeway families.
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Ellis tells how the township backed the projects that opened it to markets, among them the ship canal across the marsh to the St. Joseph River and the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad, which built its line through the northwestern part of Benton in 1871 and put a station at Benton Harbor.
By the 1950s that suburban district was called Euclid Center. R. L. Polk’s city directories of Benton Harbor for 1952 and 1954 were issued as covering Benton Harbor “and Euclid Center,” and a 1955 directory of the American Osteopathic Association lists the Margaret Lyle Memorial Hospital at Euclid Center, Benton Harbor. In February 1957 the residents voted for a new name; the Benton Harbor News-Palladium reported it on its front page on February 25, 1957. Walter Romig (1973) says the name Benton Heights came from the community’s position in relation to Benton Harbor, and the Berrien County Genealogical Society says it was chosen because of its closeness to the city.
Benton Heights has no village government of its own and is governed as part of Benton Charter Township. The census counts it as a census-designated place, which had 3,652 people in 2020.
