The story
Welcome to Hagar Township
Hagar Township holds the northwest corner of Berrien County, where the Lake Michigan shore meets the Paw Paw River. Its first permanent settler came up the river by canoe in 1839 and kept a diary of his lonely first years. Today Riverside and the lakeshore community of Hagar Shores sit among orchards and woods.
Hagar lies in surveyed Town 3 South, Range 18 West, with Lake Michigan on the west, Van Buren County on the north and the Paw Paw River flowing across its southeast. The land was ceded by the Potawatomi in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. David Schwartz, who wrote the Hagar chapter in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880), says the township was named for William Hagar of St. Joseph, whose son-in-law John N. Rogers, a justice of the peace, helped get the township organized and claimed the right to name it.
The first man to try a farm here, Henry Hawley, a Canadian, put up a cabin on Section 23 in 1839 with help from St. Joseph neighbors, but left before he had cleared an acre. That summer Charles Lamb of Vermont came up the Paw Paw by canoe with his wife and baby and settled on the northeast quarter of Section 23, and Ellis calls him Hagar’s first permanent settler. Lamb kept a journal. On January 3, 1841, he wrote that within the past year “four families have settled, — Pannel, McCrea, Bundy, and Farnum. Prospects look better; doubts gone.” On July 4, 1842, he was “not quite independent yet.”
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Mathias Farnum, who had worked on the docks at St. Joseph, moved onto Section 13 in December 1839, and Nathaniel Bundy and William McCrea followed on Section 14. Mary Jane McCrea, born May 16, 1841, was the first white child born in the township; her father was killed by a falling tree in 1849. South of the river William Allen and Michael Smith kept a bachelors’ cabin and hunted until Smith’s father, Jeremiah, brought the family from New York in 1844. Irish families named Flood, Lynch and Farley came in 1848, and the Harris family from Ohio in 1850, when all but the mother and baby fell sick with ague and the doctor’s bill came to $80.
Hagar was part of St. Joseph Township, was put into Paw Paw Township in 1834 and became a separate township in 1846. The first meeting was held in the Bundy schoolhouse, and Alfred Sensebaugh, a preacher who had been holding services on both sides of the river, was elected supervisor. Matilda Irwin taught the first school in a log schoolhouse in 1844. Until 1841 there was no road to St. Joseph, and the settlers traveled by river.
The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad, which reached St. Joseph in February 1870 and pushed north the next year (Ellis, p. 320), brought stations at Hagar and Riverside, and Hagar got its first post office. Ellis found much of the township still timbered in 1879, with lumber firms clearing it for Chicago, no church building, no mill and the lowest assessed valuation in the county. Coolidge (1906) counted only 269 people in 1854, says the population doubled between 1860 and 1870, and describes William Mueller’s 565-acre farm in the north of the township, with 160 acres in fruit.
Today Hagar Township includes the unincorporated community of Riverside, where the township hall stands, and the lakeshore census-designated place of Lake Michigan Beach, also called Hagar Shores. Interstate 196 and M-63 cross the township. The 2020 census counted 3,243 people.