The story
Welcome to Watervliet Township
Watervliet Township, in Berrien County’s northeast corner, surrounds the city of Watervliet and shares Paw Paw Lake with its neighbor. It began with shingle makers on the Paw Paw River and a crew of thirty-two French laborers sent to clear land for New York investors, and later became a land of large orchards and summer cottages.
Watervliet is surveyed Town 3 South, Range 17 West, bounded by Van Buren County on the north and east. Its land was part of the territory north of the St. Joseph River ceded by the Potawatomi and their neighbors in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821 (Ellis 1880, p. 36). Ellis (p. 339) wrote in 1879 that ‘among the farmers are a few families of Indians, who are located in the north’ of the township, farming like their neighbors in the adjoining townships. Paw Paw Lake, more than 1,200 acres of clear water, was already a resort for picnic parties and anglers, and the crooked Paw Paw River crossed the township on its way to the St. Joseph.
The first settlement was ‘Shingle Diggings,’ on the Paw Paw about three-quarters of a mile above the site of Coloma. Job Davis of Cass County made the first land entry, 150 acres on Section 21, in 1832. Levi Ballengee hired Stephen R. Gilson in November 1834 to help make 125,000 shingles, and soon other families were squatting and splitting shingles where the timber suited them. In 1837 Gilson bought all the shingles made there, 1,300,000 at once, and hired about twenty Native men to run them down the river to St. Joseph and land them on the dock. When the shingle makers asked St. Joseph Township for help with a school and were refused, they made shingles from timber on the school land and paid their teacher, Mary Youngs, with the proceeds. By 1838 the timber was gone and the settlement was abandoned.
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Sumner and Wheeler built a sawmill on Mill Creek in 1833. In 1836 Smith and Merrick of Jefferson County, New York, owners of large tracts in Watervliet, Bainbridge and Hagar, sent Isaac Moffatt with thirty-two French laborers by vessel from Buffalo to clear land, dig a millrace and build a dam, store and gristmill. Ellis says the Frenchmen ate a barrel of pork every three days. While the race was being dug in 1837, a workman named Joseph Matran turned up a tooth of enormous size, which scientists judged to have belonged to an animal far larger than an elephant. Ellis (p. 347) says the village was first called Waterford and was renamed Watervliet, ‘a Dutch term signifying flowing water,’ because another post office already had the name. Isaac N. Swain bought the mills in 1848, and the post office opened in 1849.
Coloma began in 1849 when Gilson and Gilson Osgood built a sawmill on Tannery Creek and Osgood opened a store. So much of the first day’s trade was barter that people called the place Dickerville, until Gilson, back from the California gold fields, platted it in 1855 and named it Coloma after the place he had lived near in California. The hard winter of 1842-43 was long remembered: Ellis says wild turkeys came into the village to eat corn thrown to them and one settler found seven deer dead in the snow.
Watervliet was part of St. Joseph Township at first, attached to Paw Paw Township in 1834 and to Bainbridge in 1838, and set off on its own in 1846 (Ellis, p. 347). Its records from 1846 to 1868 burned in 1867. The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad reached the township in 1869, with stations at Coloma and Watervliet, and by 1878 about 15,000 baskets of peaches a season went from Watervliet to Chicago. Coolidge (1906) describes Robert H. Sherwood’s 300-acre apple orchard on Paw Paw Lake, the largest in the county, and a paper mill opened in Watervliet in 1892. The western part of the township later became Coloma Township, and the city of Watervliet now governs itself inside the township. The 2020 census counted 3,036 people in Watervliet Charter Township.
