The story
Welcome to Sherwood
Sherwood takes its name from the township, which its first settler, Alexander E. Tomlinson, named in 1836 for his old home in Sherwood Forest, England. The village itself was laid out on E. F. Hazen’s farm when the Air Line railroad came through in 1870, and it was incorporated in 1887.
The St. Joseph River enters Sherwood Township in section 12 and runs southwest across it, taking in the outlet of Sherwood Lake in section 21 before it passes into St. Joseph County. The first settlements were in the north, on Dry Prairie, which the township shares with Athens in Calhoun County; families were living on the Athens side by 1832, and in July of that year cholera killed Warren Nichols, his wife and three of their children and Isaac Crossett within six days. A territorial road laid out about 1834 on an old Indian trail angled west from Union City across the north of the township, and many emigrants on it chose homes there. F. C. Watkins kept the well-known ‘log tavern’ on that road for eighteen years from 1835.
Alexander E. Tomlinson, a native of Nottingham, left his home in ‘Sherwood Forest’ on March 14, 1832, and reached the Dry Prairie settlement that July; during the cholera he was building the first log house in the township. Robert Waldron, who came in 1833, had earlier planted a few apple seeds in a spot inclosed by a pen ‘four rails square,’ and the trees that grew from them were still standing on his farm in 1879. When a new township was organized in 1836, taking in Union until 1837, Tomlinson proposed the name Sherwood in memory of his first home. The October 1837 census counted 217 people. The first post office in the township was called Newstead, after Newstead Abbey, also at Tomlinson’s suggestion, and Jared M. Rowell was postmaster for many years.
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The village was a child of the Air Line railroad. When the road became a certainty a village to be called Hazenville was discussed, and E. F. Hazen and Manton E. Sawin platted Sherwood on Hazen’s land in section 28. Mixed trains began running in the fall of 1870 and mail trains the next summer. Before the plat only E. F. Hazen’s house stood south of the track, with two houses north of it. Frank M. Warner opened the first store, a grocery, in the fall of 1870 in a building later used as a hotel; Jerome J. Studley bought him out in 1871 and became the first postmaster at the village that summer. J. W. French and Son ran a steam grist and saw mill, and Sawin and Stafford a planing mill. By 1879 the village had about 250 people.
A Methodist class of six members had been organized in 1838, and its frame church was built about 1856–58. In 1877 many members withdrew under M. V. Rork, a former Methodist minister, to form a body called the Church of Sherwood, which met in Red-Ribbon Hall, and a Free Methodist society was organized about 1867. Sherwood was incorporated in 1887, and its first village council met on March 31, 1887, with Robert Fraser as president. The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank opened in 1883, the Sherwood News in 1884 began a line of village papers, and a heading works started about 1883 by Stafford and Ott was making slack barrel and keg heading as the Sherwood Heading Company in 1906.
The 1906 county history praised the village’s wide streets lined with shade trees, its public park and its cement walks. A fire in 1910 destroyed a hardware and implement store, a furniture store and the Masonic temple, and another in 1923 burned five businesses, among them the post office; the township’s history says the village never fully recovered. The 2020 census counted 285 people in Sherwood.