The story
Welcome to Berrien Center
Berrien Center is a farm crossroads in the middle of Berrien Township, the first township in the county to be cleared by farmers. It grew around a post office opened in 1857, a Grange hall built in 1876 and a white Greek Revival church south of the corners that several congregations shared for more than half a century.
Berrien Township lies east of the St. Joseph River, in the country the Potawatomi gave up to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. Franklin Ellis (1880) says the township was surveyed by Noah Brookfield in 1826. Orville Coolidge (1906) calls it the first township in the county to be settled by farmers and cleared to any considerable extent, a country of rich land, oak openings and small lakes. John Johnson, a shoemaker who had worked at the Carey Mission, built a log house on section 29 in 1827, and Coolidge says that for nearly two years the Johnson and George H. Claypool families were the only white households in the township. Berrien was organized in 1832, and Coolidge notes that a large share of its early settlers were Virginians or of Virginian descent.
For its first quarter century the township had no village and no post office. Ellis writes that before 1857 people had to go to Berrien Springs or Niles for their mail. That year a post office named Berrien Centre was opened at the middle of the township, with Zera F. Wright as postmaster. Writing in 1880, Ellis called Berrien “strictly an agricultural town” that “boasts of no village,” with but one store, “that at the post-office at what is known as the Centre.” The office later took the spelling Berrien Center.
Read the full story
On land bought from Zera and Eliza Wright, Protestants of several denominations formed the Union Church District in 1857 to make a cemetery and a church they could all use. The state historical marker says the Greek Revival church, built by H. W. Rugg of Niles, was dedicated on July 4, 1858, and that the congregations took turns on alternate Sundays until 1915. Ellis lists among its users a Methodist society that had met near the Centre since 1838, the Dunkards, and the Berrien Centre Free-Will Baptist Church, organized on June 17, 1865, by the Rev. James Ashley. The Ladies Aid Society has cared for the building since 1891, and it is known for large Memorial Day observances. A few miles away, Morris Chapel, named for Bishop Morris, was built in 1846 by a Methodist society organized in 1843 (Ellis, p. 209; Coolidge calls it the first church in the township) and rebuilt in 1867.
The Grange was strong here. Ellis says Berrien Centre Grange No. 14 was organized on March 22, 1873, with Thomas Marrs as its first Master, and in 1876 built a hall at the Centre for $1,500. Marrs, whose farm adjoined the village, later served in the state Senate from 1881 to 1883 and was master of the State Grange from 1895 to 1901. Coolidge adds that the county poor farm was placed on section 17, about a mile west of Berrien Center, in 1847.
By the 1890s Berrien Centre had a merchant, physicians, an Odd Fellows lodge, a Good Templars lodge and the Grange, according to the Portrait and Biographical Record of 1893, which also mentions a Normal School at Berrien Centre where teachers were trained. Coolidge put the population of the village at about one hundred in 1904, and noted that Eau Claire, on the Pipestone line, was the only incorporated village in the township. Berrien Center is not counted separately by the census; Berrien Township had 4,868 people in 2020.