The story
Welcome to Bertrand Township
Bertrand Township stretches along the Indiana line west of the St. Joseph River, across rich prairie and bur-oak openings that once made it the leading wheat township in Michigan. Much of it was a Potawatomi reservation until 1833, and the old mill hamlet of Dayton keeps the memory of its first settler’s sawmill.
Bertrand Township takes its name from the old trading village of Bertrand, laid out in 1833 on the St. Joseph River and named for the trader Joseph Bertrand, whose wife Madeline was Potawatomi. That village lies east of the river and has been part of Niles Township since 1850, but it belonged to Bertrand Township from its organization until then. The present township is about ten miles long and three and three-fifths miles wide, bounded by Buchanan and Niles to the north, the St. Joseph to the east, Indiana to the south and Galien to the west. Its southern part takes in Portage Prairie and part of Terre Coupee Prairie; Ellis (1880) describes black prairie soil and bur-oak openings rich in lime.
By the Carey Mission treaty of 1828 most of the township was left to the Potawatomi as part of a reservation of about forty-nine sections. Coolidge (1906) says nearly all the Potawatomi villages of the St. Joseph valley were gathered on it when the first settlers came, and Ellis names a village called Swoptuck next to David Vanderhoof’s farm on section 7. The reservation was ceded at the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. Samuel Street, Coolidge says, was the one settler allowed to choose a home inside it before then, by the leave of the Potawatomi leader Pokagon, as payment for work he had done. When the Potawatomi were forced to move west, Ellis writes, the government teams gathered at Vanderhoof’s farm.
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Ellis names Benjamin M. Redding of Virginia as the first to locate a farm here: in 1831 he built a cabin and sawmill on the creek where Dayton now stands, outside the reservation, and moved his family in 1832. The first Methodist society west of the St. Joseph met at his house in 1833. Coolidge gives the first place to Nathan Hatfield, who came to Carey Mission in 1828 and built his house on Portage Prairie on the Michigan side of the state line. Settlers poured onto the former reservation lands after 1835: Vanderhoof, Charles Wells, Frederick Howe with his wife and eleven children, Alanson Hamilton, John De Armond, who traded with the Potawatomi until their removal, and many others. Ellis says the chills and fever of 1837–38 drove many of them back east.
The township was organized by an act approved March 23, 1836, which took in the fractional townships of Range 17, 18 and 19; the first election was held in April 1836 at Union Hall in the village of Bertrand, and Frederick Howe was elected supervisor. Range 19 was set off to Weesaw in 1837 (it later became Galien), and in 1850 the part of Bertrand east of the river was annexed to Niles. The Michigan Central Railroad crossed the township in 1848. Redding’s Mill became Dayton, named for Dayton, Ohio, the old home of several of its families; by 1880 it had two churches, a gristmill, a steam sawmill and nearly 300 people.
From 1844 on, Pennsylvania German farmers, the ‘Pennsylvania Dutch,’ came to Bertrand, led by John R. Rough and later David and Jacob Rough from Juniata County, and they made up a large part of the township. Coolidge says that for years Bertrand was the banner township in the state for wheat, producing 125,000 bushels in 1878. He also tells of a gang of counterfeiters, led by a Buchanan physician, who worked on a wooded island in Topinabee Lake known afterward as ‘Bogus Island.’ The 2020 census counted 2,611 people in Bertrand Township.
