The story
Welcome to Chikaming Township
Chikaming Township runs along the Lake Michigan shore between Bridgman and New Buffalo. Its hardwood forests fed lumber piers in the 1850s and 1860s, and the mill hamlets at Sawyer, Harbert, Lakeside and Union Pier became the resort villages of today. Carl Sandburg lived and wrote at Harbert for seventeen years, and Warren Woods keeps a stand of the old forest.
Chikaming is surveyed Township 7 South, Range 20 West, with some fractional sections cut off by Lake Michigan, bounded by Lake Township and the lake on the north and west, Weesaw on the east, and New Buffalo and Three Oaks on the south. The north branch of the Galien River crosses it from northeast to southwest. Its name, Ellis (1880) says, is an Indian word meaning ‘lake’; Fox (1924) says Richard Peckham chose it from the Potawatomi ‘Chickaming,’ meaning ‘at the large body of water.’ The land was Potawatomi country ceded at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis recalls that Potawatomi families still camped between the lake and New Buffalo in the 1840s.
Speculators bought most of the land early, and for years no one settled it. Ellis and Coolidge (1906) both name Luman Northrop of Erie County, New York, as the first settler; about 1840 he built a cabin and a small sawmill on section 23. Richard Peckham, who made grain cradles at New Buffalo, located on section 20 in 1843. Henry Chamberlain later remembered a land-looking trip in September 1844, when the only house in the township besides Peckham’s shanty was Northrop’s, where the travelers let themselves in, cooked supper and left a note on a shingle. Alfred and Mary Fisher Ames began clearing their ‘Clay Bank’ farm on section 30 in 1844, and in 1847 Mary Ames, later known as a writer of poetry and prose, taught the first school in her home.
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Lumber made the township. The Michigan Central Railroad built a steam sawmill on section 30 in 1847. In 1854 J. N. Wilkinson & Co., led by the Virginia brothers John W. and Joseph N. Wilkinson, bought land on sections 19 and 20, built a 600-foot pier into the lake and a steam mill, and employed 50 to 100 men cutting lumber, cordwood and railroad ties; the firm built the Greenbush and Pike piers as well, with horse railroads running back into the woods. Silas Sawyer of Ohio built a steam sawmill on section 1 about 1853 or 1854, the Goodwins and Gowdys built mills and a pier at Union Pier in the 1860s, and Oliver R. Brown ran a horse railroad to the Fuller Pier. Ellis says Chikaming produced more and finer oak and whitewood timber than any township of its size in the county.
The Board of Supervisors set Chikaming off from New Buffalo in 1856, and the first township meeting was held in April of that year at the store of J. N. Wilkinson & Co.; Silas Sawyer was the first supervisor. When the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad came through about 1870, the settlements took the names they still carry. Troy Station became Sawyer, for Silas Sawyer. Wilkinson became Lakeside; Fox says the Post Office Department frowned on the old name because of the Wilkinsons’ alleged Southern sympathies in the Civil War. Greenbush became Harbert, named by the railroad for a Chicago capitalist, and Union Pier took its name from the union of partners who built its pier and mill. German families settled in the southeast in the 1860s and built an Evangelical church on section 25 about 1869, the same year the Union Pier Baptist Church was organized.
Once the timber was gone, the sandy lakeshore turned to fruit. By 1906, Coolidge says, the Lakeside Vineyard Company had set 525 acres of grapes on sections 21 and 28, the largest vineyard in the state. In 1928 Carl and Lilian Sandburg bought lots at Harbert, where they made their home until 1945; Sandburg wrote Abraham Lincoln: The War Years there, and Lilian Sandburg raised a nationally known herd of dairy goats she called Chikaming Goat Farm. Warren Woods, a tract of primeval forest that Edward K. Warren began buying in 1879, became a state park and a National Natural Landmark. The 2020 census counted 2,778 people in Chikaming Township.