The story
Welcome to Benton Township
Benton Township grew from a few clearings in the 1830s into the heart of Michigan’s old peach belt. Its settlers dug the canal that created Benton Harbor, and in 1903 it became home to the Israelite House of David, whose bearded baseball teams and amusement park made the township famous. The old mill village of Millburg still sits on Blue Creek.
Benton covers surveyed Township 4 South, Range 18 West, cut at its northwest corner by Lake Michigan, with Hagar to the north, Bainbridge to the east, Sodus to the south and St. Joseph to the west. The Paw Paw River winds across it from the north, joined by Blue Creek, named for the bluish tinge of its water, and Ox Creek. It was Potawatomi country north of the St. Joseph River, ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, and was originally covered with heavy hardwood forest and some pine. The Legislature named it on March 11, 1837, for Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.
Ellis (1880) and Coolidge (1906) both name Jehiel Enos as the first settler. He came west in the late 1820s, helped Lucius Lyon survey this part of the county, and in 1834 settled at Millburg; from 1836 he farmed on section 13. In 1835 he and Amos S. Amsden of St. Joseph platted Millburg on Blue Creek, named for its water-power, where James H. Enos built the first sawmill in 1836. The Mortons came in 1836, and Eleazer Morton kept a tavern on the Territorial Road on section 18. Benjamin Johnson, a blacksmith, settled on the road in 1837, James Higbee bought what was said to be the township’s first wolf trap, and Phineas Pearl came in 1840 to section 25, where his 1841 house was still standing in 1880.
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Settlement was slow. The township was too thinly peopled to organize in 1837 and stayed attached to St. Joseph until 1841, although the act had named the public house at Millburg for the first election. When that election was finally held, in April 1841, thirteen votes were cast; Ephraim P. Mann was elected supervisor. The population was only 237 in the early 1840s, but it trebled in the 1860s. The reason was fruit. Coolidge says Eleazer Morton set out an orchard in 1840 and in 1845 shipped peaches to Chicago at a dollar a bushel, the second shipment from the county. By 1873, Ellis counted 2,677 orchards in Benton with more than 200,000 peach trees, the most of any township, before the disease called ‘the Yellows’ killed most of them.
Getting crops to market across the marsh along the St. Joseph was the settlers’ great problem. In 1859 Charles Hull, helping a neighbor out of the mud, predicted that a ship canal would soon reach the bluffs, and Sterne Bronson, Henry C. Morton and Hull raised land and money to have Martin Green dredge it. The canal, first only 25 feet wide, was finished in 1862, and around it the village of Bronson’s Harbor was laid out in 1860. Renamed Benton Harbor in 1865, it was incorporated as a village in 1866 and again by charter in 1869, and became a city in 1891 (Fox 1924), with half of the original village lying in Benton and half in St. Joseph Township.
In 1903 Benjamin and Mary Purnell founded the Israelite House of David, a communal religious society in the Christian Israelite tradition, just east of Benton Harbor. Coolidge described it in 1906 as owning about a thousand acres of farms and orchards, with a cannery, shops, brass bands and a small zoo. The Michigan historical marker at its entrance says it grew to about 1,000 members and in the 1920s ran an amusement park and its famous barnstorming baseball teams. After Benjamin Purnell died in 1927 the community divided, and in 1930 Mary Purnell founded Mary’s City of David on the adjoining grounds, which welcomed Jewish vacationers when many resorts turned them away.
Benton is one of the two most populous townships in Berrien County (Lincoln Charter Township had slightly more people in 2020), with the communities of Benton Heights, Fair Plain and Millburg, the Benton Harbor Fruit Market (moved to the township in 1967) and the Sarett Nature Center along the Paw Paw River. The 2020 census counted 14,374 people in Benton Charter Township.
