The story
Welcome to Mason Township
Mason is a small farming township on the Indiana line, squeezed between Ontwa and Porter and cut short on the south by the state boundary. The old Chicago road, now US 12, runs straight through it, and beside the road at Kessington stands a brick country schoolhouse that the 1882 county history called the best rural schoolhouse in the state.
This was Potawatomi land, ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821. The first settlers on Beardsley's Prairie passed straight through Mason on their way west, Mathews (1882) explains, because the open prairies of Ontwa and Pokagon drew them first. The first land entry was made by Elam Beardsley on Section 12 on January 4, 1830. Mathews says he built the township's first log cabin that year and planted its first apple trees, grown from stock carried from Butler County, Ohio. Like the rest of his family, he was a born frontiersman, and in 1834 he sold out and went west.
Darius Beardsley, another of the family, met a harder fate. One bitter day in the winter of 1833, with snow two feet deep, he walked to Edwardsburg for supplies and started home alone near dusk. Days later neighbors found him frozen to death beside a tree, half a mile from his cabin. Other families came by ox team and wagon. Jacob Ross and Jotham Curtis made the 300-mile journey from the east to Edwardsburg in a month, driving their cattle and hogs ahead of them. Curtis was a Revolutionary War pensioner. His widow, known to everyone as "Granny Curtis," rode long distances on horseback to nurse settlers in trouble, and when she died in 1878, in her ninety-eighth year, she had 163 descendants.
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The big year was 1835, when, Mathews says, nearly all the land in the township was entered by settlers or speculators. Stewart C. Gardner kept a tavern on the old Territorial road where tired emigrants slept on the floor. His wife Betsey, according to Mathews, was present at the birth of President James A. Garfield and first dressed the baby, and she died on July 2, 1881, the same day and hour that Garfield was shot. Another settler, John Novel, ground corn on a homemade hand mill so slow that a day's work made a peck of meal. One of its stones was later shown at the Pioneer Museum in Cassopolis.
Mason was set off as its own township in 1836. Mathews dates the act to March 1836 and Rogers (1875) puts the first township election on April 5, 1836, with Moses Stafford chosen supervisor. The township's own history says 1834. Rogers says the name honors Stevens T. Mason, then acting governor of Michigan Territory. At the very first election, Mathews reports, nobody had brought a ballot box, so the voters dropped their ballots into a mitten. Before that the land had belonged to Ontwa and then, from 1833, to Porter Township.
Mathews's notes on early township life include the first school, a rough log building of 1836 near "Five Points," where five roads met, and the burial in 1836 of an infant of John Worst, the first child laid to rest in the Five Points cemetery. Farmers registered their earmarks for sheep and cattle in the town books, and from 1863 the officers dutifully fixed five-cent revenue stamps to their oaths of office. Churches followed: the Free-Will Baptists, a United Brethren congregation formed in 1860 after a great revival led by Rev. Henry Luse, and an Evangelical church organized in 1874.
Kessington is the township's one village site. Moses McKessick recorded a nineteen-lot plat on Section 14 in 1872, and kept a general store there. A post office called Legar stood on his farm, with Ezra Hatch as postmaster in 1852. The township's history adds that a later post office, open from 1892 to 1904, gave the crossroads its other name, Sailor. District No. 5 built its two-room brick schoolhouse there in 1874 and 1875 for about $3,000. After the district joined the Constantine schools in 1959, the building became the township hall in 1964 and a branch of the county library in the 1970s, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census counted 2,841 people in the township.
