The story
Welcome to Oronoko Township
Oronoko Township stretches west from the bluffs of the St. Joseph River over rolling farm and fruit country. Its first settler floated his family down the river to Wolf’s Prairie in 1829, and the village that grew there, Berrien Springs, was the county seat for more than half a century. The 1839 courthouse still stands, and Andrews University’s campus lies within the township.
Oronoko covers surveyed Town 6 South, Range 18 West, on the west side of the St. Joseph River. It was Potawatomi country, and the land west of the river passed to the United States in the treaty signed at the Carey Mission near Niles on September 20, 1828, by Topinabe, Pokagon and sixty-seven other Potawatomi leaders (Ellis 1880, p. 37). Ellis (p. 278) describes the river bottoms as rich but so often flooded that farmers gave them up, and he singles out Wolf’s Prairie, about a thousand acres of open plain, as the only prairie in the county besides Bertrand’s.
Ellis and Coolidge (1906) agree that the first settler was John Pike, a North Carolinian who stopped at the Carey Mission in 1829 and then took his wife and eight children down the river in a pirogue to Wolf’s Prairie. George Kimmel of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, entered about 300 acres there the same year; his son-in-law Francis B. Murdock arrived by raft in 1830 and became the county’s first practicing lawyer. Murdock’s daughter Eliza, born in October 1831, was the first white child born in the township. Pitt Brown and his nephew Horace Godfrey floated down from Dowagiac on a raft in July 1831, and Brown opened the first tavern, ran the first ferry and became the first postmaster. In August 1831 the deputy surveyor Samuel Marrs platted the village of Berrien for Brown, Godfrey and Murdock. Ellis credits Robert E. Ward, who came in 1835, with renaming it Berrien Springs for sulphur springs on the east bank of the river.
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In 1837 Berrien Springs became the county seat. The courthouse, designed by Gilbert B. Avery in 1838 and finished in 1839, served until the seat moved to St. Joseph in 1894 (Coolidge, p. 199). The township itself was set off from Berrien Township in 1837. Ellis (p. 287) says Governor Stevens T. Mason named it, ‘doubtless in honor of Oronoko, the Indian chief,’ and that William Lemon disliked the name enough to ask why the governor didn’t ‘name it Old Bill, and have done with it.’ The first township meeting was held at William F. St. John’s house on April 3, 1837, and Edward Ballengee was elected supervisor. At first Oronoko also took in what is now Lake Township, which was organized in 1846. Until 1847 both Berrien and Oronoko straddled the river; that year the St. Joseph was made the boundary between them.
Steamboats tied the village to the world. The Newburyport reached Berrien Springs in 1832, followed by the Matilda Barney, the Davy Crockett and others, and Eli Ford built a large warehouse across the river for freight. Lyman A. Barnard, who ran the ferry for Brown and later became a physician, once got the mail across an ice-choked river by inching along the ferry rope astride it, pushing the mail bag ahead of him. A bridge replaced the ferry in 1844.
The interior filled with farm families from 1831 on. Hezekiah Hall settled on the river two miles above the village in 1831; his widow told Ellis that she watched Potawatomi gatherings on the bluff opposite her cabin, came to count them as friendly neighbors and still kept some of their language decades later. Henry Freed, his grandson Samuel Summers and Joseph Feather came from Pennsylvania in 1832, and a party from Bedford County followed in 1835. Joshua Feather settled on Section 7 in 1837 and founded the Feather settlement in the northwest. Coolidge says the family name in Pennsylvania was Vedder and that the Feathers belonged to the ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’ They and their neighbors founded three Evangelical Lutheran congregations: Salem in the Feather settlement (1860), Mount Tabor in the southwest (1863) and St. Paul’s in the village (1871).
By 1879 the village had about 1,000 people but still no railroad, which Ellis blamed for the idle water power of the river. The Berrien County Pioneer Association began holding yearly reunions in Barnard’s Grove in 1876, the year after it was organized, and Ellis estimated the crowd in June 1879 at 10,000. In 1906 Coolidge reported a company preparing to dam the river near Pardee Island to generate electricity, a project he expected to form a lake above the village. The 2020 census counted 9,226 people in Oronoko Charter Township.
