The story
Welcome to Burlington
Burlington grew at the water power on the St. Joseph River bought by William and Ansel Adams in 1834. The brothers built a sawmill there in 1837 and a bridge in 1838, laid out the village in 1842, and it was incorporated in 1869.
The St. Joseph River enters Burlington Township from Tekonsha and flows past the village on its way southwest into Branch County. The first settler was Eleazer McCamly, who came from western New York in the summer of 1832 with his wife, three sons and two daughters; his son Milton and Richard Tuck had entered half of section 26 for him, and he and Tuck built the first log house, for some months the only home in the township, on what was first called McCamly’s Prairie. McCamly sowed the first wheat in the fall of 1833, and it yielded forty-three bushels to the acre. Joseph Sanders arrived on October 8, 1833.
In 1834 William and Ansel Adams came with their widowed mother and bought land that included the water power where the village now stands. Justus Goodwin put up a twelve-foot-square shanty there in 1834 and traded goods and whisky to the Indians for furs. David Dexter kept the first tavern, a log house, from about 1835, and a log schoolhouse on the village site opened in 1837 with Mary Buckingham as teacher.
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The Adams brothers built the township’s first sawmill on the St. Joseph in 1837 and the first bridge over the river in 1838; the bridge served thirty years until a new one replaced it in 1868. Their frame house of 1838 was the first in the village proper, and the Baptists built the first church in the township there in 1841. The brothers surveyed and laid out the village in May 1842. J. B. Tucker opened the first store in 1843, and Rufus Osborn built the first gristmill in 1861.
Burlington was incorporated as a village in 1869. The Air Line branch of the Michigan Central, built in 1870, crossed only the southeast corner of the township, and Burlington station stood about a mile and a half from the village. Seventh-day Adventists organized a church there in 1861 and built a frame meeting house in 1876, and the Methodist circuit based at Burlington supplied preaching to Abscota, Clarendon, Tekonsha, Lyon Lake and Eckford. The 2020 census counted 281 people in Burlington.
