The story
Welcome to New Buffalo Township
New Buffalo Township is the westernmost township in Michigan’s lower peninsula, where the Galien River reaches Lake Michigan. A ship captain wrecked on this shore in 1834 saw a harbor in the river mouth and named the town after his home port. The Michigan Central made it a railroad terminus, and in 1935 the nation’s first highway welcome center opened here.
Austin N. Hungerford, who wrote the New Buffalo chapter in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880), calls it “the most westerly township of the lower peninsula.” The land was ceded by the Potawatomi in the treaty made at the Carey Mission in 1828. The Galien River runs through Pottawattamie Lake, which in early days was two miles long and covered with wild rice, and enters Lake Michigan at New Buffalo. The shore is sand and shifting dunes.
In the fall of 1834 Captain Wessel Whittaker of Hamburg, New York, was beached in a gale with the schooner Post-Boy near the mouth of State Creek. Walking with his crew to Michigan City, on the way to St. Joseph to report the loss, he passed the mouth of the Galien River and was struck by its promise as a harbor. He entered the land, drew a town on paper, named it New Buffalo, and sold a half share to the Buffalo merchants Jacob A. Barker and Nelson Willard. In the spring of 1835 his party came overland and hired the surveyor Alonzo Bennett at Bertrand to lay out the village, and a hotel, store and houses went up fast. Whittaker also set aside a block, Seaman’s Square, as a gift to lake captains.
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The township was erected by the legislature in March 1836, taking in the ground that later became Chickaming and Three Oaks townships, which were set off in 1856. Thirty-six votes were cast at the first election, held at Russell Goodrich’s tavern, and Alonzo Bennett was chosen supervisor. The village was incorporated the same month. Then came the Panic of 1837. Ellis says that in the winter of 1841–42 only two families, Jacob Gerrish’s and Russell Goodrich’s, still lived in the village. A lighthouse built in 1839–40 was undermined by the shifting sand and fell about 1857.
The Michigan Central Railroad revived the town. It chose New Buffalo for its western terminus, started work in the fall of 1847, built a bridge over the Galien and two long piers into the lake, and ran steamers to Chicago until the line was finished to Chicago about 1852. From about 1850 German families settled in large numbers, and by 1880 the township was, Ellis says, “largely populated by them.” A German Evangelical church was organized in 1858, and St. Mary’s Catholic church was built in 1858–60. The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad was completed to New Buffalo on September 7, 1870. Ellis gives the population as 123 in 1840, 873 in 1854 and 1,389 in 1870.
The village charter lapsed about 1840, was renewed in 1869 and was repealed in 1879. The city of New Buffalo now lies within the township’s bounds but governs itself. In the twentieth century the lakeshore filled with summer places: the township includes the villages of Grand Beach and Michiana and part of Union Pier, and the Golfmore Hotel, opened in 1921, burned in 1936. On May 4, 1935, the Michigan State Highway Department opened the nation’s first highway travel information center on US-12 at New Buffalo; it moved to Interstate 94 in 1972.
The 2020 census counted 2,455 people in New Buffalo Township.