The story
Welcome to St. Joseph Township
St. Joseph Charter Township wraps around the city of St. Joseph along Lake Michigan and the lower St. Joseph River. A trader named William Burnett kept a post and an apple orchard on the river here before American settlement, and the township’s farmers were among the first in Michigan to ship peaches across the lake to Chicago.
St. Joseph is the smallest township in the county, a triangle of a little over seven sections in Town 4 South, Range 19 West, at the mouth of the St. Joseph River. Ellis (1880, p. 312) notes that the name comes from the Jesuit ‘Mission of St. Joseph of Lake Michigan,’ St. Joseph being the patron saint of New France. The land south of the river was Potawatomi country ceded in the Carey Mission treaty of 1828; the Treaty of Chicago of 1821 had already set aside reservations on the north bank, beginning about two miles from the mouth, for the children of William Burnett and his wife Kawkeemee, sister of the principal chief Topinabe (Ellis, pp. 36-37).
William Burnett, a New Jersey trader, kept a post on the river long before the Americans came. Ellis (p. 312) puts it a little more than a mile up the river, in an apple orchard Burnett planted, and says part of the orchard was still standing. Coolidge (1906, p. 172) says Burnett’s son James later held title to the ‘Burnett Orchards,’ which Captain Langley bought in 1865. A state marker near Miller Drive and Langley Avenue marks the site. Coolidge also passes on a California newspaper story that Edward Smith squatted on the Burnett orchard about 1828 and may have been the first American settler in the township, though he thought Calvin Britain probably came first.
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Calvin Britain, a teacher at the Carey Mission, and Augustus B. Newell pre-empted land at the river mouth in 1829 and bought it on September 30, 1830. Britain laid out the village of Newburyport in 1831, later renamed St. Joseph, and was elected lieutenant governor in 1852. The township has a tangled legal history. Ellis (p. 313) notes that a territorial act of April 12, 1827, already named a township of St. Joseph, with its first meeting at the house of Timothy S. Smith; an act of June 9, 1832, made St. Joseph cover most of the northern half of the county. Royalton was taken off in 1835 and Benton in 1837, leaving the present seven and a half sections. William Huff was the first supervisor whose name is known, in 1834. At the township meeting of April 3, 1837, at the Mansion House, 57 votes were cast.
Fruit made the township’s name. Ellis (p. 315) says seedling peaches were grown here as early as 1829, that B. C. Hoyt shipped peaches from his garden to Chicago in 1839, and that Captain Curtis Boughton, who farmed on the Niles road south of the village, carried peaches across the lake by the barrel. Hoyt brought in budded varieties from Long Island in 1842, and Boughton set out one of the first orchards of budded trees, 130 of them, in 1849. In 1868 the township shipped 507,134 packages of peaches and 28,283 bushels of berries. When the disease called the ‘yellows’ killed the peach orchards, growers turned to small fruits. In 1873 more than sixty growers in the township each had over six acres in fruit.
The railroad from New Buffalo reached St. Joseph in 1870, celebrated with a jubilee on February 2. The township bought its cemetery, about five acres on Section 26, in May 1849. By the 1890s St. Joseph had its own city government with a mayor, while the township kept its own supervisor; Coolidge lists township supervisors from 1834 through 1906. Today the township includes the lakeshore village of Shoreham. The 2020 census counted 9,993 people in St. Joseph Charter Township.