The story
Welcome to Sawyer
Sawyer is a crossroads village in the northern part of Chikaming Township, a few minutes from the high dunes of Warren Dunes State Park. It began as a lumber settlement in the 1850s, took its name from the mill builder Silas Sawyer, and grew up around a station on the lakeshore railroad.
Chikaming Township lies south and west of the St. Joseph River, in the country the Potawatomi ceded to the United States in the treaty made at the Carey Mission in 1828. Franklin Ellis (1880) and Orville Coolidge (1906) both say the name Chikaming is an Indian word meaning “lake.” The northern part of the township, where Sawyer stands, was heavily timbered with beech, maple, whitewood and ash, and Coolidge notes that for years most of the land belonged to speculators and mill owners who lived elsewhere.
The first clearing near Sawyer, according to Ellis, was made about 1846 by Richmond Horton, who settled on the southwest quarter of section 1 and built a steam sawmill. About 1853 Silas Sawyer of Ohio bought Horton’s place and the northeast quarter of section 10 and built a steam sawmill of his own. The timber was so heavy, Ellis writes, that for the whole first year his cutting was confined to ten acres. Sawyer prospered for a few years but lost heavily after the panic of 1857, and in 1873 he moved to Dallas, Texas. He was the first supervisor of Chikaming Township when it was organized in 1856. Coolidge dates his mill to about 1854 and puts it “near the site of the station now known as Sawyer.”
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Other lumbermen followed. Bartlett J. Rogers moved a mill from the lakeshore on section 3 to his farm on section 11, and Andrews and Miller ran a steam mill on section 3 from about 1851 to about 1860. In 1861 Oliver R. Brown built a steam sawmill on section 2, near the present village, and Ellis says a horse railroad ran from “the Sawyer Settlement” to the Fuller Pier at the edge of Lake Township, where lumber and cordwood were loaded onto lake vessels.
The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad, later the Chicago and West Michigan and then the Pere Marquette, was completed from Pentwater to New Buffalo on September 7, 1870. Ellis says that when it opened, a Sawyer post office was established “in the north part of the township, at Troy Station,” with James Spaulding as postmaster. The Berrien County Genealogical Society explains that the railroad’s naming of Troy Station led the older village of Troy, a few miles east, to take the name New Troy. By 1906 Coolidge was calling the stop Sawyer.
In 1919 Scientific American reported that Mr. and Mrs. E. K. Warren of Three Oaks had set aside wild land on the shore of Lake Michigan “north of Sawyer” as reservations of the Edward K. Warren Foundation. The dunes became Warren Dunes State Park in 1930, and the park’s entrance on Red Arrow Highway still carries a Sawyer address. Sawyer is not counted separately by the census; Chikaming Township had 2,778 people in 2020.