The story
Welcome to Shoreham
Shoreham is a small residential village on the Lake Michigan shore just south of St. Joseph. Walter Romig says it was founded by William Ducker, who had a fine home there, and the local story is that Ducker, an Englishman, put “shore” and “ham” together to make its name. It became a village in 1930.
The mouth of the St. Joseph River, about four miles north, is where Europeans first set foot in what is now Berrien County. Orville Coolidge (1906) tells how La Salle landed there in 1679, how a mission was kept among the Miami and later the Potawatomi, and how the trader William Burnett kept a post there with his wife Kawkema, sister of the Potawatomi leader Topinabee, until his death about 1811. The Treaty of Chicago of 1821 reserved land in Benton, St. Joseph and Sodus for their children. The shore south of the river, where Shoreham now lies, was given up later, in the treaty made at the Carey Mission in 1828, as Franklin Ellis (1880) explains.
Shoreham sits in surveyed township 5 south, range 19 west. Ellis says that ground was part of Royalton Township until 1867, when the legislature set it off as Lincoln Township, and that the old township of St. Joseph, created in 1827, held its first election at the house of Major Timothy Smith, who had settled near the east bank of Hickory Creek in the northern part of what became Lincoln. Ellis adds that Smith was interested in laying out a “paper village” on the lakeshore in the western part of the township, which came to nothing. Shoreham today is inside St. Joseph Charter Township; how and when its ground passed from one township to the other is not explained in the county histories.
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Ellis described the lakeshore land west of Hickory Creek as originally barren, with stands of pine, so that early settlers chose other places first, but he noted that it had proved well suited to fruit. Pioneers in the southern part of St. Joseph Township included Curtis Boughton, who settled on the Niles road south of the village in 1834, and the Abbe and Gard families.
The village is a twentieth-century creation. Romig’s Michigan Place Names (1973) says Shoreham was founded by William Ducker, who had a fine home there. The Berrien County Genealogical Society adds that Ducker was English, liked the “ham” ending of English place names, and combined it with “shore.” The Society dates the incorporation of the village to April 7, 1930, and Gary Barfknecht’s almanac of Michigan dates (1984) also lists Shoreham among the villages incorporated in 1930.
Shoreham has stayed a quiet place of homes along the bluffs. The village keeps a small park, Shoreham Downs, where it has held concerts and a summer picnic, and its office is on Brown School Road. The 2020 census counted 844 people.