The story
Welcome to Sodus Township
Sodus Township follows the east bank of the St. Joseph River, where its first settlers were river boatmen who farmed between trips. Mills turned on Pipestone Creek, a pioneer traded forty acres for a gun and an old horse, and a riverside summer resort here was later run by a future president of Lithuania.
Sodus is a fractional township of about twenty sections in Town 5 South, Range 18 West, on the east side of the St. Joseph River, which separates it from Royalton and Oronoko. Its land was part of the territory north and east of the river ceded by the Potawatomi and their neighbors in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821 (Ellis 1880, p. 36). Pipestone Creek crosses the north part of the township to the river.
The first improvement was a sawmill built on Pipestone Creek, on what is now Section 3, by James B. Larue, a lumber dealer from St. Joseph. Ellis dates it to 1836 in the township chapter (p. 328) and to 1835 in his general history (p. 129). A man named Scott had already squatted near the river on Section 22, and Charles Palmer came in 1837 but soon traded his forty acres to William H. Rector for a gun and an old horse. Both left, so Ellis counts the Rector family as the first permanent settlers. William H. and David S. Rector came from Sodus, New York, in 1835 to work the river. On their second trip west in 1836, with their brother Hiram, the keelboat Niles broke loose from its towing steamer in a storm on Lake Erie and drifted about a hundred miles before the men rowed her into Cleveland. David worked three years at Larue’s mill and in 1839 moved onto 120 acres on Section 14. Their father David Rector settled beside them in 1837.
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Speculators held the river land at high prices until about 1840, and David S. Rector told Ellis that when he married in 1843 his nearest neighbor outside the family was two miles away; hearing a distant rooster in the morning made the place feel neighborly. Most of the early settlers, Ellis says, followed the river as boatmen to earn cash while their land came into crops. Luke Sharrai, who had come from Canada as a boy, built the first finished frame house. Francis Versaw, a French Canadian whom Coolidge describes as a former agent of the American Fur Company at Green Bay, bought river land with James McDougall in 1841.
Sodus was part of Royalton until 1842 and then of Pipestone. On October 11, 1859, on the petition of John Gano and 243 others, the part of Pipestone in Range 18 was set off as a new township. David S. Rector was asked to suggest a name and proposed Sodus, after his home town in New York. The first township meeting was held at the Rector schoolhouse in April 1860. In 1879 Ellis found no village and no store at all in Sodus, since Benton Harbor was close by, and voters had recently turned down aid to a railroad. Pipestone Creek ran three gristmills and two sawmills.
Fruit farming grew on the level land, and the river brought summer visitors. Coolidge (1906, p. 265) describes the Sebago resort, opened in 1895 by J. J. Theiss with a hotel and cottages, and Tabor’s Resort two miles upriver, kept by Ernest Tabor, which was then the southern end of the interurban line from Benton Harbor. According to Wikipedia, the Tabor Farm resort, opened in 1891, was run from 1961 to 1983 by Alma and Valdas Adamkus; Valdas Adamkus later became President of Lithuania. The resort closed in 1990. The 2020 census counted 1,995 people in Sodus Township.
