The story
Welcome to Coloma Township
Coloma Charter Township wraps around the city of Coloma and reaches to the middle of Paw Paw Lake, the largest inland lake in Berrien County. Its first settlement was a camp of shingle makers on the Paw Paw River in the 1830s, and around 1900 the lake drew summer crowds by the tens of thousands. Orchards, the river and the lake still give the township its character.
Until 1917 the ground of Coloma Township was the western part of Watervliet Township, surveyed Town 3 South, Range 17 West, in the northeast corner of Berrien County. It was Potawatomi country until the Treaty of Chicago of 1821 opened southwestern Michigan to American settlement. The Paw Paw River winds west across the township toward the St. Joseph, and Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880) describes Paw Paw Lake as “a place of popular resort for picnic parties, anglers, and others in search of recreation.” Ellis also notes that a few Native families were then farming in the north of the old township.
The first settlement was not a farm but a woodcutters’ camp. In 1832 Job Davis of Cass County made the first land entry in the township, 150 acres on Section 21, meaning to cut lumber and shingles for the St. Joseph market. He sold out to Griffith, Hoyt & Hatch, who planned a canal from Paw Paw Lake to the river, a sawmill and a new town, until a man named Sumner, nursing a grudge against one of the partners, bought the land their dam needed and refused to sell. Levi Ballengee, left with an unused boarding house, turned to making shingles, and in November 1834 he hired Stephen R. Gilson of Chautauqua County, New York. The place became known as “Shingle Diggings.”
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For three years the Diggings flourished. Gilson brought his family out in 1835, and in 1837, Ellis says, he bought 1,300,000 shingles at one time and hired about twenty Native men to float them down the river to St. Joseph. The settlers paid for a school in 1837 by cutting the timber on the school section into shingles, and Mary Youngs, a shingle maker’s daughter, taught it. By 1838 the good timber was gone, the shingle makers moved on, and the Diggings, Ellis writes, “drops out of the history of the township.”
Farming came with the New York land firm of Smith & Merrick, which owned large tracts here and in Bainbridge and Hagar. Moses Osgood came out with their agent in 1836, and about 1838 he settled on Section 19, a mile and a half west of the future site of Coloma; Orville W. Coolidge’s A Twentieth Century History of Berrien County (1906) calls him the first permanent pioneer farmer of the township. Settlers multiplied in the 1840s. Ellis says the old township was set off from Bainbridge as Watervliet in 1846, and Coolidge names Gilson Osgood, Moses’s brother, as its first supervisor. The township records from 1846 to 1868 burned in 1867.
Ellis says the name Watervliet came from the mill village to the east, first called Waterford, and that it is “a Dutch term signifying ‘flowing water.’” In 1849 Gilson Osgood and Stephen Gilson built a sawmill on Tannery Creek, and the crossroads that grew around it, nicknamed Dickerville, became the village of Coloma in 1855. Minot Ingraham and Gilson started a ferry across the Paw Paw at Coloma in 1845, and the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad came through in 1869.
Fruit became the great business. Coolidge describes a 300-acre apple orchard of more than 14,000 trees, with peaches, plums and pears set between them, on Robert H. Sherwood’s farm “Lake View” on the shore of Paw Paw Lake, and calls it the second largest in the state. From the 1890s farmers around the lake began renting rooms to summer travelers, and the North Berrien Historical Society says that by the early twentieth century as many as 40,000 tourists came each summer. Dr. William A. Baker of Coloma, Coolidge notes, promoted the railroad from Coloma to the lake.
The North Berrien Historical Society dates the separation of Coloma Township from Watervliet Township to 1917. The township line now runs through the middle of Paw Paw Lake, and the Paw Paw Lake census-designated place spans both townships. Interstate 94 crosses the south of the township. The 2020 census counted 5,051 people in Coloma Charter Township.
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