The story
Welcome to Gilead Township
Gilead Township, a fractional township on the Indiana line, began with Bishop Philander Chase of Ohio, who rode out of Adams’ mill in 1832, found a lake among burr oaks and named the place Gilead. It was organized in 1837, the first of the county’s four fractional townships to get its own government.
Gilead is fractional Township 8 South, Range 7 West. Its settlers belonged to Prairie River township until the act of March 11, 1837, gave Gilead its own government, the first of the four fractional townships to receive it. In October 1837 it had 184 people.
In the spring of 1832 Bishop Philander Chase, the first Episcopal bishop west of the Alleghenies, was riding through Michigan when the landlord Judson at Adams’ mill told him of a ‘charming, limpid lake’ eight miles to the southeast, surrounded by burr-oak and prairie land. Following an old Indian trail, Chase found it, and in his own words spent the day riding round the region, ‘which the writer named ‘Gilead;’ a name it still bears.’ He had a frame room built for a ploughman, had fifty acres broken during the Black Hawk war scare, and chose a mill site on Prairie River at the outlet of Island Pond, on section 4, the first sawmill in the township. A post office was opened at the Chase home in 1834. His house burned, and the family lived in the schoolhouse until June 1836, when the Chase episode ended.
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Others followed Chase’s trail. Abishi Sanders, the first supervisor, entered 240 acres in sections 8 and 18; Benjamin Booth built the second frame house in the township on the south shore of Gilead Lake, and William Purdy was the first blacksmith. James Bennie and John McKinley came from Scotland in 1833, and many families came from Onondaga County, New York. Settlers who crossed the low land east of the Chase settlement formed the nucleus of East Gilead, the locality once called Arnold’s Corners.
The 2020 census counted 656 people in Gilead Township.