The story
Welcome to Lake Township
Lake Charter Township runs along the Lake Michigan shore below some of the highest dunes in the state, now Warren Dunes State Park. In the 1850s a lumber company ran a private railroad here to its own pier, and later the township grew more strawberries than any other in Berrien County. It is also home to the Cook Nuclear Plant.
In 1880 Lake Township covered a little more than a full surveyed township, Town 6 South, Range 19 West, plus about six sections in Range 20, with Lake Michigan on the west. The land west of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the Potawatomi in the treaty made at the Carey Mission in 1828. John L. Rockey, who wrote the Lake chapter in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880), describes a line of high sand hills along the lake, sandy plains behind them, and a swamp several miles wide crossing the township, which Coolidge (1906) calls the “Big Meadow.” The township was part of Oronoko until 1846; the township itself says it was later divided into Lake and Baroda townships, leaving Lake with about 23 square miles.
Settlement began in the dry east, near Oronoko. Coolidge names John Harner, who settled on Section 25 about 1834, as the first permanent settler. Thomas Phillips came in 1836, and in 1837 he sold a mill site on Hickory Creek to Peter Ruggles and Erastus Munger, whose sawmill on Section 2, Ellis says, cut some of the lumber for the courthouse at Berrien Springs. Henry Lemon came in 1839 and Benjamin Lemon in 1842. The first township election was held in April 1846 at Benjamin Lemon’s house, with 18 votes, and Bradley M. Pennell was elected supervisor. The township records from 1846 to 1867 were later destroyed. A village called Livingston was laid out in eighty blocks on Section 25 in 1848, but it soon went back to farmland.
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The west of the township waited for the lumbermen. In the fall of 1856 George Bridgman, Warren Howe and Charles F. Howe formed the Charlotteville Lumber Company and built a $20,000 steam sawmill, a pier 500 feet long on the lake, and about seven miles of railroad into the forest. The village that grew up around it was named Charlotteville for Charlotte Howe. Ellis reports the claim that its engine, the “John Bull,” was the first locomotive ever run in the United States, and adds in a footnote that “This statement, however, is clearly erroneous.” The mill burned in 1863, and two more mills on the site burned, the last in 1870. Other mills worked at Brown’s Station, at a short-lived settlement called Paintersville and at Morris Station.
When the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad was built along the shore in 1869–70, George Bridgman platted a new village half a mile east of Charlotteville at the station, which took his name. The post office, opened in 1861 as Laketon, later took the name Bridgman too. Ellis gives the population as 557 in 1860 and 1,006 in 1870. Methodists had met in the township since 1846, and the United Brethren since 1850, but in 1880 there was still no church building.
Coolidge (1906) says that about 1890 settlers, many of them German, began to pour in, doubling the population and the price of land in ten years. By then the township had two unincorporated villages, Bridgman and Baroda, and the nurseries of A. L. Baldwin, Charles Whitten and F. L. Ackerman shipped strawberry plants by the carload. “The township of Lake,” Coolidge writes, “produces more strawberries than any other township.”
Bridgman later became a separate city, and Baroda a separate township. Warren Dunes State Park was created in 1930 from land held by the Edward K. Warren Foundation, named for the Three Oaks businessman who preserved the dunes; its highest dune, Tower Hill, rises about 240 feet above the lake. Construction of the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant began in 1968. The 2020 census counted 3,316 people in Lake Charter Township.
