The story
Welcome to Union Township
Union Township, on the St. Joseph River in northern Branch County, was set off from Sherwood in 1837. Its history begins at the mouth of the Coldwater River, where a trader named John Clawson is remembered as the first white resident and where Union City grew from Justus Goodwin’s mills of 1833; at its eastern edge Abram Aldrich built the mill that became Hodunk.
Union covers surveyed Township 5 South, Range 7 West, and was organized from part of Sherwood by an act approved March 11, 1837; the first township meeting was held at the house of Chester Hammond on April 3, 1837, and voted, among other things, a bounty of five dollars on every wolf killed in the township. The St. Joseph River crosses the northwest corner and is joined at Union City by the Coldwater River, the outlet of numerous lakes to the south. The township was originally heavily timbered and was settled in the interior only after the prairie and oak-opening lands elsewhere had been taken.
Johnson, citing a St. Joseph County authority, names John Clawson, from near Mongoquinong Prairie in what is now LaGrange County, Indiana, as the first white man to make his home at the mouth of the Coldwater, where he kept a small store or trading post; Collin dates him to about 1830. The first permanent settler came in May 1833: Justus Goodwin, who began a mill race and sawmill. A post office named Goodwinsville was opened, a village of that name was platted in August 1835, and in the spring of 1837 an eastern company platted the ‘village of Union City’ on a two-hundred-acre tract and built a saw and grist mill and a store. Johnson notes the circular mounds on the banks of the Coldwater, thought to be burial places.
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In 1836 settlers began to come into the woods south and east of the village, many of them, Johnson thought, from Niagara and Chenango counties in New York: Alpheus Saunders, Lewis Hawley, David Kilbourn and others in the southwest, and the Buell brothers and Charles A. Lincoln, a carpenter who helped build the first Union City House and the Red Schoolhouse. Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Ann Saunders on November 1, 1838, was the first in the township.
On the east line, at the junction of the Coldwater River and Hog Creek, the Quaker Abraham Aldrich built a sawmill and in 1836–37 a grist mill, which was grinding in 1837; his house was in Union, though most of his land lay in Girard. It was called the Cocoosh mill after the prairie, from an Indian word Johnson translates as pork or hog. The settlement was named Orangeville when its post office opened but was best known as Hodunk; Roland Root built a five-story mill there in 1847 after the first one burned. The Michigan Air Line Railroad, built largely with local subscriptions canvassed in Union and Sherwood, entered the county at Union City and opened to Niles in February 1871. The village of Union City lies in the northwest of the township. The 2020 census counted 2,942 people in Union Township.