The story
Welcome to Tekonsha Township
Tekonsha Township, on the St. Joseph River in southern Calhoun County, was organized in 1836 and named, by the settlers’ unanimous choice, for Te-kon-qua-sha, a Potawatomi chief whose grave lay in the old Indian town on the site of Tekonsha village. The Michigan Central’s Air Line crossed it in 1870.
Tekonsha is surveyed Township 4 South, Range 6 West, and was part of Marshall until it was organized in 1836. The St. Joseph enters on section 24 and leaves on section 19 after about eight miles, and was dammed at the village for a grist mill and sawmill; Nottawa-seepe Lake, on section 3, runs into Fredonia, and Warner’s Lake lies on section 6.
The village stands on the site of a Potawatomi town on the north bank of the St. Joseph, which Everts says held two or three hundred people in tents and bark wigwams when the settlers came; its burying ground was on the site of the present cemetery. The settlers learned that a carefully kept grave was that of a much-loved chief named Te-kon-qua-sha, and when they came to organize a township they unanimously gave it his name, shortened to Tekonsha. Everts also records that a settler named Roger Sherman dug up the chief’s body one night, to the anger of the Indians.
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Darius Pierce made the first land location on May 29, 1832, half of section 27, including the village site, and Timothy Kimball, the first actual settler, built a log cabin there in the spring of 1833. Samuel Hemenway came in 1836 and bought the unfinished Tekonsha House, later the Blake House, and was the first merchant. Harris C. Smith’s sawmill cut its first lumber in June 1836, the village was platted in May 1836, and a plank schoolhouse was built on the northeast part of the plat in 1837. Gardner adds the Baptist church of July 19, 1838, and the Presbyterian church of March 24, 1847.
The Air Line division of the Michigan Central was finished across the township in the fall of 1870, the citizens voting fifteen thousand dollars toward it. The village of Tekonsha lies in the southeast of the township. The 2020 census counted 1,520 people in Tekonsha Township.