The story
Welcome to Tekonsha
Tekonsha stands on the north bank of the St. Joseph River, on the site of a Potawatomi town, and takes its name from the chief Te-kon-qua-sha. It was platted in 1836 on the Jackson and White Pigeon territorial road, gained the Air Line railroad in 1870 and was incorporated in 1878.
When white settlers came, the 1877 county history says, two or three hundred Potawatomi lived here in canvas tents and bark wigwams, and raised corn on eight or ten acres south of the river, beside a burying ground that later became the village cemetery. In winter they laid their dead in hollowed logs. One grave, in Timothy Kimball’s garden, was kept fenced and cared for year after year; it was the grave of a much-loved chief, Te-kon-qua-sha. A settler named Roger Sherman dug it open one night to see what lay in it, finding only a rifle and some trinkets, and the Indians could hardly be kept from revenge. When the township was organized in 1836 the settlers gave it the chief’s name, shortened to Tekonsha.
Darius Pierce made the first land entry on May 29, 1832, half of section 27, including the village site. Timothy Kimball bought it and in the spring of 1833 built a log cabin near the later sawmill, the first of four log houses on the site. Lewis Fuller opened a tavern of tamarack logs in the winter of 1835–36, and in 1836 Samuel Hemenway of Vermont opened the first store and bought the half-built Tekonsha House, which was opened with a Christmas party in 1837.
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In May 1836 Charles D. Smith, Harris C. Goodrich, Cornelius Wendell and their partners laid out the village, 528 lots on the north side of the St. Joseph. Goodrich and Smith built a sawmill in June 1836, the first frame house was built of its lumber, and a schoolhouse of sawed plank followed in 1837. A mail route ran from Marshall to Tekonsha and on to Coldwater, soon carried by four-horse stages. Dr. Campbell Waldo built the flour mill about 1850.
The Air Line division of the Michigan Central was completed across the township in the fall of 1870, the township voting fifteen thousand dollars toward it. Tekonsha had seven or eight hundred people in 1877. It was incorporated as a village in 1878, with Octavius C. Lyon as its first president, and the village jail was built that year. Its first newspaper, the Tekonsha News, appeared on December 7, 1878.
In 1924 the community set a marker for Te-kon-qua-sha, giving his dates as 1768–1825. The 2020 census counted 653 people in Tekonsha.
