The story
Welcome to Niles Township
Niles Charter Township surrounds the city of Niles along the St. Joseph River, where bluffs rise from the water and the old Detroit–Chicago road crossed at Bertrand. Here a Baptist mission school served Potawatomi children in the 1820s, Joseph and Madeline Bertrand kept their trading post, and the first water-powered gristmill in western Michigan ground its first grist. Three state markers stand within a mile of one another near the Indiana line.
The St. Joseph River runs through Niles Township from south to north for nearly fifteen miles, Orville W. Coolidge writes in A Twentieth Century History of Berrien County (1906), “hemmed in for considerable of the way by high and picturesque bluffs.” The Dowagiac River joins it just north of the city of Niles. When the Territory created Niles Township on November 5, 1829, it took in all of Berrien County; Berrien and St. Joseph townships were set off in 1832, Bertrand in 1836 and Buchanan in 1837, and in 1850 the part of Bertrand east of the river was added back to Niles.
This was Potawatomi country. At the Treaty of Chicago in 1821 the Potawatomi agreed to set aside a square mile on the St. Joseph for a mission, and in October 1822 the Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy brought a party from Fort Wayne to build it. The Board of Missions named it Carey, for William Carey, the Baptist missionary in India. The school opened on January 27, 1823, with thirty Potawatomi pupils who were fed, lodged and clothed by the mission. Austin N. Hungerford, writing in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880) from McCoy’s journal, says that Topinabee (Ellis spells it Topinabe), the principal chief, and nearly all his people settled south of the mission, where about thirty families cleared and fenced fields and kept livestock.
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The mission’s own records describe what followed. Whiskey sellers settled nearby in 1824 and 1825 and traded liquor for the Potawatomi families’ clothing and tools, and the missionaries themselves began urging the government to move the Potawatomi west, away from the traders. A treaty was held at the mission in September 1827, and in September 1828 Governor Lewis Cass and Col. P. Menard held another there by which the Potawatomi ceded the land between the St. Joseph River and Lake Michigan. The government paid $5,721.50 for the mission’s improvements in 1830, and the school closed.
Long before the mission, Joseph Bertrand, a French trader, kept a post at Parc aux Vaches, “cow pasture,” named for the buffalo that once grazed there, where the Sauk Trail between Detroit and Chicago crossed the river. A state marker dates the post to about 1808. He married Madeline, said to be a daughter of Topinabee, and land was deeded to her under the 1821 treaty. On her land the village of Bertrand was platted in 1833 by Alonzo Bennett on the Detroit–Chicago road. In 1836 it had three hotels and seven dry-goods stores, but the proprietors held their lots at high prices and the railroads passed it by. A brick church was built there in 1837, and on September 8, 1844, the Sisters of the Holy Cross received their habit for the first time in America at Bertrand, under the direction of Rev. Edward Sorin. Madeline Bertrand is buried in the old churchyard. Her son Joseph was elected the township’s constable in 1832, and Coolidge says he moved west to join the Potawatomi in 1858.
American settlers came from 1828. Stephen Salee, a Pole who had fought in the Russian campaign of 1812, opened a store in a log cabin a mile below Niles. Eli Ford of Pokagon Prairie built a mill on Dowagiac Creek, where the first grist was ground in the spring of 1828, using millstones cut from boulders and, Ellis says, a bolting cloth of muslin “taken from a dress of Mrs. Ford.” Ellis calls it the first water-powered mill in the county and the first flouring mill in western Michigan. The Laceys built mills on the Dowagiac from 1829, and Henry Lardner later ran a woolen mill where Dowagiac and Kinzie creeks meet.
The township’s rich soil made it a wheat and orchard country; the state census of 1874 counted 1,795 people and 68,492 bushels of wheat. Today Niles Charter Township wraps around the city of Niles and includes the unincorporated community of Bertrand. The 2020 census counted 14,417 people in the township.