The story
Welcome to Milton Township
Milton is the little township in the southwest corner of Cass County, tucked against Berrien County and the Indiana line. It was settled by so many families from Delaware that the neighborhood was called the Delaware settlement, and it took its name from a Delaware town. Its most famous building was a log tavern under a giant white oak.
Milton was Potawatomi country, and the county histories record that the Indian title here was given up by the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. Part of Beardsley's Prairie, named for the pioneer Ezra Beardsley, runs along the township's eastern side, and Mathews explains that its open ground let the first farmers raise a crop in their very first season. The Brandywine flows through the northwest corner, where William Rosewarne once ran a sawmill.
Who came first is an old argument. Some told Alfred Mathews it was John Hudson of Ohio, who bought land in Section 11 in November 1830 and soon went home, his love of pioneer life 'thoroughly satiated.' Others gave the honor to J. Melville, a Scottish blacksmith who bought in Section 24 in September 1829. Rogers lists Oliver Drew's entries of 1829 as the first. Cannon Smith of Sussex County, Delaware, reached Edwardsburg on October 11, 1828, bought 160 acres in Section 14 in 1829, and moved in during the spring of 1831. His house, Mathews says, was the first frame house in the township, and he built it with only an ax, a drawshave, a hammer and an auger, splitting the studs like fence rails and pegging the frame together with wooden pins. To raise his second land payment he walked to Delaware and back.
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The best-known Milton pioneer was Peter Truitt, also of Sussex County, who arrived on June 17, 1831, after a forty-four-day journey. He opened the first store in the township and a tavern on the old Detroit and Chicago road. Travelers called it the 'White Oak Tree Tavern' for the huge oak that spread its branches over the house, and Mathews says the floor was sometimes covered with the beds of weary emigrants. When Truitt learned that his cabin stood on the wrong piece of land and that a rival had set out to claim it, he set out in the night for the land office at White Pigeon and got there first. He was postmaster of the township's only early post office, called Dover, which Wikipedia (citing Romig) dates from 1836 to 1841.
Truitt also gave the township its name. Rogers tells the story: the petition to organize the township, left with Truitt to collect signatures, called it Southland, and he crossed that out and wrote in Milton, the name of his home town in Delaware. The Legislature set Milton off from Ontwa by an act approved March 15, 1838, and ordered the first meeting held at the house of Peter Truitt, Jr. James Aldrich was the first supervisor.
Religion came early. The Methodist ministers held meetings in Cannon Smith's house, and the society built Smith's Chapel on land Smith gave, named in thanks for his generosity. It still stands on Redfield Road, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Schooling started in Thomas Sullivan's double log house, where Asa M. Smith taught. In 1838 Malinda Norris taught fifty pupils in an old cooper shop and then a barn, until an epidemic of ague broke up the term. That same year one school district voted a $200 tax for a schoolhouse, then thought better of it and voted $25 for a house and a stove.
Mathews has one more remarkable settler: Andrew Jackson, a man of 'powerful frame' who had been pressed into the British navy and fought with Nelson at Trafalgar before ending his days on a Milton farm. By 1880 Milton was purely agricultural, with 105 farms and no village, store, post office or mill, its people trading in nearby Niles and Edwardsburg. A short-lived post office named Truitt's operated at a railway station from 1897 to 1901. The 2020 census counted 3,128 people.
