The story
Welcome to Coldwater Township
Coldwater Township, around the city of Coldwater, was one of Branch County’s first two townships, organized in 1833. Its prairie held an Indian reserve and trading posts before Abram F. Bolton and John Morse opened a tavern on the Chicago trail in 1830, and the first county seat, the village of Branch, stood on its western river.
Coldwater Township is surveyed Township 6 South, Range 6 West. When Branch County received its own government on March 1, 1833, everything east of a north–south line through the centre of the county was made one township called Coldwater; eight townships were later carved from it, and the act of March 11, 1837, that created Ovid left Coldwater with its present boundaries, the first in the county cut down to a single survey township. The city of Coldwater, chartered in 1861, lies within it.
Collin’s 1906 history explains why the prairie was not settled first: by the Chicago treaty of 1821 a reserve six miles square, covering the eastern two-thirds of the present township and the western third of Quincy, was kept for the Potawatomi, and they did not quit it at once after the treaty of 1827. Major Abraham Edwards, passing in August 1828, found an Indian trading post kept by Beaubien on the site of Coldwater and a large Indian settlement on the prairie. In 1830 Abram F. Bolton and John Morse, whose wives were sisters, built a two-room log cabin on section 23, the first house on Coldwater Prairie, and opened it as a tavern; the first township meeting was held there. The Morses’ daughter Henrietta, born in 1830, was the first white child of a settled family in the township.
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The first county-seat commission chose the bank of the Coldwater River where the Chicago road crossed it, and the prospective village there, probably named by Bolton, was called Masonville; Johnson says that choice was voided because the commissioners had not taken the oath, and the seat went to Branch, laid out by Elisha Warren and others on a rise half a mile north of the Black Hawk sawmill on section 30; the mill was running by the spring of 1831 and was the first sawmill in the county. Harvey Warner was appointed the first postmaster in 1832, with the office at Branch; E. T. Paxton opened a store in 1833, a distillery followed about 1835, and the schoolhouse served also as church and as the county’s first court house. The county’s first newspaper, the Michigan Star, was issued there by Charles P. West in May 1837. After the seat was fixed at Coldwater in 1842, Johnson wrote in 1879, many of Branch’s buildings were taken down and moved away.
Johnson also records the killing of the chief Sau-au-quette at his camp northwest of Coldwater, the smoky summer of 1856, the county poor farm on section 9, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad across the southern part of the township, which reached Coldwater on December 10, 1850; the Mansfield, Coldwater and Lake Michigan line was graded and bridged north and south through the township but never finished. In October 1837 the township had 960 people, nearly a quarter of the county. The 2020 census counted 3,406 people in Coldwater Township, outside the city.