The story
Welcome to Berrien Springs
Berrien Springs grew on Wolf’s Prairie, a thousand-acre plain in a bend of the St. Joseph River. Laid out in 1831 as Berrien, it was the county seat from 1837 to 1894, and its courthouse of 1839, the oldest in Michigan, still stands on the square. Today the square is the county’s history center, and the village is a center of the fruit and wine country.
The village stands on Wolf’s Prairie, which Ellis (1880) describes as a tract of about a thousand acres and, apart from Bertrand, the only prairie in the county. John Pike, with his wife and eight children, came down the river in a pirogue from the Carey Mission in the summer of 1829 and built a log house on the river bottom; for a year his family were the only settlers in what became Oronoko Township. George Kimmel of Pennsylvania entered about three hundred acres that year and in 1832 built the first sawmill, on Lemon Creek, and his son-in-law Francis B. Murdock, the county’s first practicing lawyer, came by raft down the Dowagiac and the St. Joseph in 1830. Murdock’s daughter Eliza, born in October 1831, was the first child born in the township.
Pitt Brown and his nephew Horace Godfrey, millers from Sandusky, Ohio, landed from a raft near the foot of the hill in July 1831, built a log shanty that became the first tavern, and put a scow ferry on the river. In August 1831 the deputy surveyor Samuel Marrs platted the village of Berrien for Brown, Godfrey and Murdock. A post office opened that year with Brown as postmaster, kept in the bar of his tavern. Robert E. Ward, who came from Albany in 1835, is said to have renamed the place Berrien Springs, for the sulphur and other mineral springs on the east bank of the river. Thomas Love and Edward Ballengee opened the first store about 1831, and in 1832 the steamer Newburyport was the first boat to reach the village from St. Joseph.
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Niles held the first county court, and the county seat was placed at St. Joseph in 1832. Then an act approved February 25, 1837, moved it to “the village of Berrien” from May 1, provided the proprietors repaid St. Joseph for its public buildings and gave lots for the county’s use; the supervisors accepted lots 255, 256, 301 and 302 on April 18, 1837. A wooden jail was finished in June 1838, and the courthouse, built by James Lewis under a contract of August 1838 for $2,500 to plans by Gilbert B. Avery, was finished and occupied in 1839. The county agricultural society was organized at the courthouse in 1850 and resolved to hold its first fair here that September; the fair of 1851 was held here too, before the fairs moved to Niles.
Berrien Springs was incorporated as a village on October 15, 1863, by the board of supervisors, with Philip Kephart as first president, and was reincorporated in 1867 and again in 1878. Ellis counted about a thousand people in 1880, a village that was busiest in court weeks and still waited for a railroad; the St. Joseph Valley line came from Buchanan in 1881. A long fight over the county seat ended in a county vote, upheld by the supreme court, that moved it to St. Joseph in December 1894. The old courthouse became a community hall and, in 1901–02, the first home of Emmanuel Missionary College, now Andrews University, which grew up just outside the village.
Rose Hill Cemetery, laid out in 1837 on a rise above the river, holds a marble shaft of 1874 to the township’s Civil War dead. Charles A. Chapin’s Berrien Springs Power and Electric Company was preparing in 1906 to dam the St. Joseph here. In 1967 the county and the historical commission bought back the courthouse, restored it, and the whole courthouse square, with the sheriff’s residence of 1870 and the Murdock log cabin, is now the History Center at Courthouse Square, run by the Berrien County Historical Association. The village once called itself the Christmas pickle capital of the world, and revived its pickle festival in 2021. The 2020 census counted 1,910 people.
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