The story
Welcome to Lincoln Township
Lincoln Charter Township lies on Lake Michigan just south of St. Joseph, with the dunes and dwindling lakes of Grand Mere State Park on its shore. One of the first settlers in all of Berrien County made his home here in 1827. Land the pioneers thought too poor to farm became, by the 1870s, a sea of berry patches and peach orchards.
Lincoln Township is fractional surveyed Town 5 South, Range 19 West, about two and a half miles wide on the north and five on the south, cut off on the west by Lake Michigan. The land west of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the Potawatomi in the treaty made at the Carey Mission in 1828. Hickory Creek drains a swampy belt through the township, and in the southwest three lagoons and their marshes bear the French name Grand Marais. John L. Rockey, who wrote the Lincoln chapter in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880), says the sandy ground west of the creek was once thought barren and was covered in places by pine.
One of the earliest settlements in Berrien County was made here in 1827 by Major Timothy Smith of Ohio, who had taught at the Carey Mission. His house, near Hickory Creek, was the polling place for the first election of the old township of St. Joseph, and as justice of the peace he performed its first marriage, of Calvin Bartlett and Pamelia Ives. He later kept the lighthouse at New Buffalo and finally went to California. In May 1836 E. P. Deacon, Hiram Brown and Robert Richards of St. Joseph platted a village called Liverpool at the mouth of the Grand Marais, meant to saw the shoreline pine, but Ellis says it remained “a ‘paper city.’”
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Real farming began in the east in the 1840s. Martin Lounsbury and Samuel Davis came in 1842, and Gould Parrish, who had worked on the Berrien Springs courthouse, settled on Section 36 in 1843; by 1880 he was the oldest settler in the township. The Archer family came in 1845 and Stephen Lamunion in 1847. In June 1847 Parrish and others formed a Methodist class at what became Spear’s schoolhouse, and a revival that winter brought in more than a hundred converts.
Lincoln was part of Royalton Township until 1867. At the first township meeting, on April 1, 1867, the Republican ticket won 106 votes to 74 and James A. Parrish was elected supervisor. The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad came through in February 1870 with stations at Stevensville, Lincoln and South Lincoln. Stevensville was laid out by Thomas Stevens, a Niles banker, with an addition by D. N. Brown; its post office opened in 1871, and Coolidge (1906) says it was incorporated as a village in 1893. A post office opened at South Lincoln Station in June 1879 with M. N. Lord as postmaster. Wikipedia says the community of Glenlord, first called Lincoln, was named for Monroe N. Lord, who gave land for the railroad right-of-way, and had a post office from 1879 to 1905.
Fruit transformed the township. Until 1863 most of the soil was thought unfit for peaches, but in 1872, before the peach blight, the township had 140,987 peach trees, 288 acres of strawberries and more than 35,000 grape vines, and in 1878 its stations shipped 44,713 half-bushel packages of berries. Coolidge describes Lincoln in 1906 as densely settled in small holdings, “presenting almost the appearance of a continuous village, with fruit gardens in the rear of the residences,” with many German settlers. The Methodists dedicated a church at Stevensville on July 18, 1878, and Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Joseph built a chapel in the north of the township the same year.
Grand Mere State Park, about 1,100 acres of dunes and woods around three glacial lakes, was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1968. The township also includes the village of Stevensville. The 2020 census counted 14,929 people in Lincoln Charter Township.
