The story
Welcome to Stevensville
Stevensville grew up around a station on the lakeshore railroad in the 1870s, in a township so thick with fruit farms that a county historian said it looked like one continuous village. It is still a small village, close to the dunes and the marshes of Grand Mere.
The lakeshore south of St. Joseph was ceded by the St. Joseph Potawatomi at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis (1880) describes the land of what became Lincoln Township as level and in places low and swampy, drained by Hickory Creek. Coolidge (1906) describes the Grand Marais, a series of ponds or lagoons about a mile and a half long near the lake. Lincoln was part of Royalton Township until 1867.
Settlement here came late. Ellis says that in 1854 Dr. J. N. Percell and his father-in-law James Dunham settled at what would be Stevensville; Coolidge names Percell as the village's first physician. In February 1870 the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad was finished through the township, and stations were opened at Stevensville, Lincoln and South Lincoln. Ellis notes that no store had been kept in the township before 1870.
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Stevensville was laid out by Thomas Stevens of Niles, who owned a large tract of land there; Coolidge calls him a prominent banker. An addition was platted by a Brown, D. N. Brown in Ellis and A. D. Brown in Coolidge. The post office opened in 1871 with James Dunham as postmaster. That year M. M. Dunham built a steam sawmill at Stevensville, which L. R. Brown later turned into a gristmill with three run of stones, the only flouring mill in the township in 1880. By then the village had Methodist Episcopal and Protestant Methodist churches, several stores, hotels and shops, and about twenty houses.
The Methodist Episcopal church, a neat frame building costing $800, was dedicated on July 18, 1878, by Bishop Merrill. The Protestant Methodists, who had members in the township since 1854, finished their own meeting house at Stevensville late in 1878. Lake Grange No. 84 of the Patrons of Husbandry, organized in Lake Township in 1873, moved its meetings to Stevensville in 1874.
Fruit made the township prosper. Coolidge writes that the light soil, poor for grain, had been made to pay by fruit, especially berries and peaches, and that Lincoln was so thickly settled on small holdings that it looked almost like one continuous village, with fruit gardens behind the houses. Stevensville was incorporated as a village in 1893, and the state census of 1904 counted 237 people. The 2020 census counted 1,147.