The story
Welcome to Jefferson Township
Jefferson Township was settled by neighbors from Jefferson Township in Logan County, Ohio, who brought the name with them. It is a quiet farming township between Cassopolis and Edwardsburg, crossed by two railroads, home to the old county poor farm, and remembered for a road laid out with burnt sticks and a gang of counterfeiters who kept a saddled horse at the door.
This was Potawatomi country until the Chicago treaty of 1821 and the Carey Mission treaty of 1828 transferred the tribe's claims in the region to the United States. Mathews tells how, in early October 1828, four families in Jefferson Township, Logan County, Ohio, packed their goods into cloth-covered lumber wagons: Nathan Norton, Abner Tharp, Moses Reams and William Reams. Near Elkhart a prairie fire swept up to the cabin where the women waited, and one of them, terrified, ran out along a fallen tree over the river clutching a gun. They wintered in two "half-faced shanties" of unhewn logs with sod roofs, an open front hung with a quilt, and hay piled in a corner for a bed. Rogers, writing earlier, dates the first settlement to the fall of 1832, so the old histories disagree by four years.
Maxwell Zane came from Ohio in September 1829. His wife Jane rode a pony the whole eleven days carrying an eighteen-month-old child and cooking for the men, and six weeks after arriving she gave birth to Nancy, whom Mathews calls the first white child born in the township. The Marmons, a Quaker family from Logan County, arrived in 1830, and in 1832 Peter and Richmond Marmon and D. T. Nicholson set out what Mathews calls the township's first orchards. Mary Colyar and Peter Reams were married in the winter of 1831. The township was created by an act of March 29, 1833, from the north half of original La Grange and the south half of Ontwa, with its first meeting at the house of Moses Reams, and Robert Painter was its first supervisor.
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Roads came by odd routes. Settlers heading north from Edwardsburg had followed an old winding trail until Isaac Hulse staked out a shortcut with burnt sticks and then dragged a huge log over it several times to make it look like a well-traveled road. When the road commissioners had the Edwardsburg to Cassopolis road surveyed in 1837, they followed Hulse's line almost exactly, and that is why the road still runs on a diagonal. The first school, Mathews says, was taught in 1833 by Martha McIlvaine in Maxwell Zane's smokehouse, on a floor of patted earth, with slab benches set on four sticks.
Church life began in barns and stumps. A Baptist congregation was organized on July 10, 1830, in John Reed's barn under Rev. Adam Miller, and its first log meeting house on section 12 had no stove, so a fire burned on the bare ground and the smoke left through the roof shakes. Mathews adds that men smoked their pipes during the service, stepping out to a stump fire for a light. The First Christian Church was organized on November 20, 1847, and when Rev. Jeremiah Kenaston arrived in 1851 to find the schoolhouse locked against him, he climbed a stump, preached, baptized four people, and was hired on the spot for $60 a year. Mathews also records that the township's first sermon is said to have been preached by a Black minister in Maxwell Zane's house, and that Ishmael Lee, who lived on section 1 near Cassopolis, was remembered as one of the most faithful conductors on the Underground Railroad.
Jefferson had its villains too. About 1842, Rogers says, four Button brothers ran a counterfeiting ring from a farm in the township and kept a horse hitched at the front door. When Sheriff Glenn came with a posse, one brother leaped on the horse and escaped while the others fled the other way, and years later a die for making bogus Mexican dollars turned up near their old place.
Mills and public buildings followed. John Pettigrew Jr. built the first sawmill on section 6 in 1831 or 1832, and its lumber went as far as Niles, Mishawaka, South Bend and Elkhart. On Christiana Creek, at the township's eastern edge, a sawmill built by Peter Shaffer and Dr. Beardsley became Redfield's Mills under George Redfield, with a store and post office. About 1858 the township built a town hall on section 15, which Rogers calls the first building put up expressly for township purposes in the county. The county poor farm, bought from Asa Kingsbury, received a brick house in 1854, a larger building in 1869 and 1870, and an asylum in 1871, on 280 acres in sections 2, 3 and 10.
The Air Line railroad crossed the northwest corner in 1871, and local citizens donated three acres for a station. Israel A. Shingledecker proposed the name Itasca, but the stop was named Dailey for A. H. Dailey, roadmaster of the railroad. A post office opened in 1872, Benjamin Field's machine shop installed what Mathews calls the first planer in the county, and in March 1881 the village organized the Dailey Cornet Band. Today Jefferson Township has 2,590 residents and its hall stands on Jefferson Center Street.
