The story
Welcome to Pipestone Township
Pipestone Township is square, rolling orchard country on the Cass County line, crossed by Pipestone Creek. Its first family pitched a cloth tent by a cold spring in 1837, its post-office village took the name Shanghai from a doctor’s prize chickens, and by 1906 it held the largest orchard in Berrien County.
Pipestone is surveyed Town 5 South, Range 17 West, on the east line of the county. The land north and east of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Ojibwe in the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821 (Ellis 1880, p. 36). Ellis (p. 292) says about a tenth of the township was swamp, including the ‘big meadow’ of nearly a thousand acres in the east, which was being drained when he wrote. Eastern speculators named Lawrence, Corning, Bushnell and Voorhies bought much of the land from the government at $1.25 an acre and sold it to settlers at $2.50.
Both histories name James Kirk of Virginia as the first settler. In the fall of 1836 he followed Indian trails and blazed section lines out from Niles until he came to a cold spring on Section 20, entered 80 acres around it and in April 1837 brought his wife and seven children by ox wagon, cutting road as he went. After a first night at Henry Rush’s house in Berrien, they spent the second in a cloth tent by the spring. On August 20, 1837, while the family still lived in a pole shanty, his daughter Mary Ellen was born, the first white child born in the township. Dr. Morgan Enos came the same summer to Sections 18 and 19 and was for years the only physician in that part of the county. Robert Ferry, from Ireland, lived alone in his cabin with his dog from 1837 to 1839, and his wife later told how wolves came to the doorstep and how a bear was caught eating one of their pigs alive.
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The township was created by an act of February 16, 1842, and at first ran west to the St. Joseph River. Twenty-seven votes were cast at the first meeting, at William Boughton’s house, and James B. Larue was elected supervisor. The population was 277 in 1845 and 785 in 1854. In 1859 the part west of Range 17 was set off as Sodus.
William Boughton and Joab Enos laid out a village called Pipestone, and a post office by that name opened in 1846. Ellis (p. 295) says the village was renamed Shanghai in 1853 in honor of Dr. Enos’s Shanghai fowls, hatched from eggs his daughter carried home from New York in her lap. The Enos brothers built a sawmill on the creek in 1844, and Blandon A. Pemberton ran a small log gristmill on Section 31 from 1847. In the south, William Smythe Farmer had a post office opened in 1861 and named it Eau Claire, ‘clear water.’ The village of Eau Claire was incorporated in 1891 and straddles the Pipestone-Berrien line, which runs down its main street (Coolidge, p. 251).
Germans from Cincinnati, led by William Hackstatt, came to the northeast corner in 1850. Hackstatt lived at first in an abandoned log schoolhouse he found on his land. The German families organized the First German United Evangelical Zion Church in 1871 and built a church on their cemetery lot in 1872. Ellis also records that Andrew Jackson, a Black settler, took up land on Section 14 in the mid-1850s. On the night of May 26, 1860, a tornado leveled the Robinson and De Witt houses on Section 9; a four-year-old De Witt boy died of his injuries, and a stovepipe was found three miles away.
Coolidge (1906) wrote that Pipestone was disproving the idea that only the lakeshore could grow fruit. The West Michigan Nurseries kept more than 500 acres in orchard there, with about 30,000 peach trees, the largest orchard in the county. The 2020 census counted 2,177 people in the township.