The story
Welcome to Weesaw Township
Weesaw Township is the flattest township in Berrien County, laced by the branches of the Galien River. It bears the name of Weesaw, war chief of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, and its oldest village, New Troy, grew up around its sawmills, one of which rafted its lumber down the river to New Buffalo.
Weesaw is Town 7 South, Range 19 West, a full thirty-six sections. Its name honors Weesaw, whom Ellis (1880, p. 33) calls the war chief of all the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph. His village stood on the south side of the river in what is now Niles Township, and he signed the Treaty of Chicago of 1821 and the supplementary articles of the Chicago treaty of 1833 (Ellis, pp. 36, 38). The land of the township itself was ceded in the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis describes Weesaw as a man who loved fine dress and ceremony, whose favorite wife was a daughter of the chief Topinabe.
Ellis (p. 353) calls Weesaw ‘more nearly level than any township in the county,’ low and marshy in the northwest and center, higher and rolling in the east. It was heavily timbered with beech, maple, ash, basswood and above all whitewood and black walnut. That timber delayed settlement, Ellis explains, because mill owners bought whole sections for the logs and held them until the trees were cut. Coolidge (1906) describes one whitewood in Weesaw more than five feet across that yielded six twelve-foot logs.
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Squatters came and went, and the first lasting settlers arrived about 1836. Solomon and Hiram Gould built a sawmill, the North Mill, at what became New Troy, and Nelson Willard, Joseph G. Ames and Ezra Stoner bought a half share of the water power and built the South Mill across the stream. The village of New Troy was platted in 1837. Lumber from the Gould mill was rafted down the Galien River to New Buffalo and lightered out to lake vessels. The mill owners soon left, and the property sat abandoned through years of lawsuits until Ambrose and Thomas Morley built a new sawmill on the old site in 1853. Phineas Stratton, on Section 7, was among the first to farm.
The township was created by an act of March 20, 1837, which also included what is now Galien until February 29, 1844. Ezra Stoner was the first township clerk, and Joseph G. Ames was supervisor in 1839. Ellis gives the population as 142 in 1840, 155 in 1845, 404 in 1854, 753 in 1860 and 1,243 in 1870. Alpheus Hill, who came in 1840, moved in 1846 to the crossroads that became Hill’s Corners, where a Baptist church organized in 1845 built its meetinghouse in 1854. Both histories note the mystery of Charles McCracken, township clerk in the 1840s: Ellis says he died mysteriously at New Troy, while Coolidge says he disappeared and was never heard from again.
In 1879 New Troy had about 170 people, four general stores, a sawmill, a gristmill and a woodenware factory. Alonzo Sherwood ran a horse-drawn railroad from his Oak Grove sawmill to Brown’s Station and on to Brown’s Pier on Lake Michigan. Glendora, near the old Hill’s Corners, was founded in 1890 and named by railroad officials; it had a post office from 1891 to 1966 (Wikipedia). The 2020 census counted 1,832 people in Weesaw Township.
