The story
Welcome to Three Oaks Township
Three Oaks Township sits on the Indiana line in Berrien County’s southwest corner, once so thickly forested that settlement waited for the railroad. It took its name from three oaks that grew so close together they looked like one tree, and its 1866 township hall still stands in the village of Three Oaks.
The township takes in most of Town 8 South, Range 20 West, and the south tier of sections of Town 7 South, all except the westernmost range of sections. It was Potawatomi land ceded in the Carey Mission treaty of 1828 (Ellis 1880, p. 37). Ellis (p. 333) describes a solid forest of maple, beech, elm, ash, sycamore, oak, cherry, black walnut and tulip trees with thick underbrush, cranberry marshes in the northeast and the South Branch of the Galien River running through it. Coolidge (1906), drawing on notes by Henry Chamberlain, records a black walnut twenty-nine and a half feet around and choice whitewood that sold for $8 to $10 a thousand feet.
Richard Love of Ohio was the first settler, buying land on Section 24 at the foot of a high hill near a large spring in the spring of 1835. Sylvester Shead and his son Erasmus followed about 1836, along with John Hatfield, Vincent Nash and others from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and New York. Ellis tells of Joseph Love, who could neither read nor write but wanted to be justice of the peace: ‘Jake (his son) can read and John can write, and I can judge them all …’ The voters declined. Moses Chamberlain of New Hampshire bought about 800 acres in 1836, settled on Section 15 in the winter of 1843-44 and built the first frame house in the township. Coolidge says he voted in 1844 for James G. Birney, the antislavery candidate.
Read the full story
Land speculation around New Buffalo held back settlement until the Michigan Central Railroad came through about 1850. The railroad wanted cordwood, and the clearing began. In January 1850 Henry Chamberlain took a contract to deliver 2,000 cords of wood at seven shillings sixpence a cord to the siding where the village now stands, clearing his own land as he went. In 1854 he and Joseph G. Ames opened a store, and a post office was named Three Oaks for three large oaks that stood near the west line of Section 2, so close together that in full leaf they looked like one tree. Gilbert B. Avery, master mechanic of the Michigan Central, and Thomas Love built a steam sawmill at what became Avery’s Station in 1854. Ellis estimates that the township cut about 12,000 cords of wood a year from 1850 to 1875.
The board of supervisors set Three Oaks off from New Buffalo Township in 1856, and the first meeting was held that April at the schoolhouse near Chamberlain’s side-track, where 91 votes were cast. Henry Chamberlain was elected supervisor; he later ran for governor in 1874 and came within a few thousand votes. The first school was the Cherry schoolhouse, built of cherry logs about 1840, ten by fourteen feet, where Elizabeth Chamberlain taught in 1844. In 1847 the township raised the first frame schoolhouse in western Berrien County. The town meeting of 1859 voted $25 for a library, and in 1864 the voters raised $800 for a town hall, built in 1866 on lots given by Henry Chamberlain. The village of Three Oaks was platted in 1857 and incorporated in 1867.
Swiss and German families, among them John Louis Hess, Jacob Houser, Joseph Strahle and Max Wetzer, came from the 1850s on, and by 1906 Coolidge estimated three-fifths of the rural population was of German origin; he also mentions a Dutch Reformed church founded by Hollanders in the north of the township. The village grew after 1884, when E. K. Warren began making dress stays from turkey quills at his Featherbone factory. The 2020 census counted 2,324 people in Three Oaks Township.
