The story
Welcome to Pokagon Township
Every county history calls Pokagon the 'classic ground' of Cass County: the first settler's cabin, the first child born, the first school and the first roads all came here. It also had a city that never existed, a state fish hatchery that failed, and a converted hop barn where 'The Old Rugged Cross' was first sung.
The township carries the name of Pokagon, the Potawatomi leader whose people farmed the prairie when the settlers arrived; the Indian title to this country was given up by the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. Uzziel Putnam, his wife Anna and their small daughter left Ohio with Abram Townsend's party on May 17, 1825. Their journey, as Mathews tells it, was one long misadventure: rain, mud to the oxen's bellies, a broken axle replaced with a fresh-cut tree, the Black Swamp, and a canoe made in a single day from the bark of an elm, which floated part of their goods down the St. Marys River to Fort Wayne.
Putnam reached Pokagon Prairie late in 1825, and after a winter in a bark-roofed shanty twelve feet square the family moved into a cabin without floor, door or windows, since there was not yet a sawmill in the territory. The winter was hard; they lived mostly on boiled corn and killed thirteen wolves. In the spring of 1826, with the iron of a plow brought from Ohio fitted to homemade woodwork and hitched to five yoke of oxen, Putnam and Isaac Duckett broke six acres. By September he had 350 bushels of corn ripe in the field. On August 12, 1826, Uzziel Putnam, Jr., was born, remembered by Mathews and Rogers as the first white child born in the county.
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Others came quickly: Baldwin Jenkins, Squire Thompson, the Markhams, Lewis Edwards, Alexander Rodgers and his eight children in 1828, the Burks and Clyborns from Virginia. In the fall of 1828 the settlers took over Benjamin Potter's cabin for a school, which Mathews says was taught by Mrs. Gamaliel Townsend, though Rogers names Miss Jane Brown as the first teacher. The first postmaster, Samuel Markham, kept the mail at his house, and about 1832 an English boy named George Cook carried it on horseback. Letters cost 25 cents, and some waited weeks in the office until the addressee could find the money.
Pokagon was one of the county's four original townships, created in November 1829 and at first six miles wide and fifteen long, taking in what is now Silver Creek and the north half of Howard. Silver Creek was cut off in 1837. In 1836 two promoters, Jonathan Brown and Elias B. Sherman, platted the city of Shakespeare at the rapids of the Dowagiac River, with broad avenues, parks, a canal and a lithograph showing ships at its wharves. Sherman soon backed out in disgust, nothing was ever built, and Mathews says the county clerk was still answering letters from lot buyers years later.
The Michigan Central Railroad crossed the township in 1846 and William Baldwin laid out the village of Pokagon beside it in 1858, while the older mill village of Sumnerville stayed on the creek. In 1873 the state put its first fish hatchery at Crystal Springs, on the Methodist camp-meeting grounds, but the water proved too warm and impure, and in 1881 the hatchery moved away. Pokagon Grange No. 42 was organized the same year the hatchery opened.
In January 1913 the Reverend George Bennard, helping lead a revival at the Pokagon Methodist Episcopal Church, finished a hymn he had begun in Albion, and the church choir sang 'The Old Rugged Cross' in public for the first time. The church was a hop barn of 1862 that the Methodists had bought and remodeled in 1876; restored, it is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The war correspondent Webb Miller, who reported the 1930 beatings at the Dharasana salt works in India, was born at Pokagon in 1891. The township had 2,119 people at the 2020 census.
