The story
Welcome to Berrien Township
Berrien Township was the first in the county to be settled and cleared by farm families, beginning with John Johnson’s log house in 1827. Its rolling land, dotted with eighteen small lakes, runs along the St. Joseph River opposite Berrien Springs, and it keeps two state historic churches and the crossroads village of Berrien Center.
Berrien Township is surveyed Township 6 South, Range 17 West, laid out by Noah Brookfield in 1826. It is bounded by Pipestone and Sodus to the north, Niles to the south, Cass County to the east and the St. Joseph River and Oronoko to the west. Coolidge (1906) describes the river along its western edge as dotted with islands and hemmed in by high, wooded bluffs. Ellis (1880) counted eighteen small lakes, the largest Smith’s Lake at about 600 acres. It was Potawatomi land east of the St. Joseph, ceded in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. Coolidge recorded that the Potawatomi often stopped overnight at settlers’ homes, and that the old settler Isaac Lybrook spoke well of the character of the leader Pokagon, whom he knew.
John Johnson, a young man from near Richmond, Indiana, walked to Michigan in the winter of 1824 and worked clearing land near Niles. In the summer of 1827 he located eighty acres on section 29, built a log house and brought his wife, John Lybrook’s sister, there that fall. Coolidge calls him the second permanent settler of the county. Late in 1827 his brother-in-law George H. Claypool took land on section 27, and for nearly two years the two families were alone in the township. John and Isaac Smith came from Indiana in 1830 to the lake that bears their name, and Michael Hand came from Ohio in 1831. Many of those who followed, among them the Marrs, Riggin, Jenkins, Webster, Burke and Pinnell families, were Virginians, and Coolidge notes that most of them held strong anti-slavery convictions.
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Eli Ford, who had built the first water-powered gristmill in the county on Dowagiac Creek in 1828, moved to Berrien in 1832, built a sawmill near the river and in 1833 a grain warehouse at the east end of the present Berrien Springs bridge, where goods were landed and farm produce shipped downriver. William Lemon built the first sawmill in the township in 1832. The township was erected in 1832 on a petition presented by Calvin Britain, and at first took in all of what became Oronoko and Lake. Its first recorded election was held on April 1, 1833, at Pitt Brown’s tavern on the west bank of the river, and Brown served as supervisor through 1840. In 1837 the land west of the river was set off as Oronoko.
The Methodists were the first congregation, organized in a log schoolhouse in the 1840s; in 1846 they built Morris Chapel, named for Bishop Thomas A. Morris, and replaced it in 1867 with the church that still stands. Protestants of several denominations built a union church in the 1850s; the one that stands at M-140 and Pokagon Road was dedicated on July 4, 1858. The county poor farm was placed on section 17, a mile west of Berrien Center, in 1847. The Berrien Centre post office opened in 1857, and in 1876 the Grange built a large hall at Berrien Center. The village of Eau Claire lies partly in the township.
Ellis called Berrien ‘strictly an agricultural town’ in 1880, with no village, one store at Berrien Center and four sawmills; its population in 1870 was 1,405. It remains largely rural, with M-140 running north and south through the center. The 2020 census counted 4,868 people in the township.
