The story
Welcome to Porter Township
Porter is the largest township in Cass County, so big that people have always split it into North Porter and South Porter. Its southern edge carried the Chicago Road, and in the great years of westward travel nearly every farmhouse along it took in travelers. It also gave the county its most brazen swindle, the coal oil boom of 1865.
Porter Township fills the southeast corner of Cass County, and the St. Joseph River cuts across about two of its sections. It was Potawatomi country until the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821. The original survey treated it as two townships, Towns 7 and 8 South, which is why Rogers (1875) says the names North Porter and South Porter 'became necessary.' Mathews (1882) counted 29,434 acres in farms and calls it larger than any other township in the county.
The first settler, all three county histories agree, was John Baldwin, a Southerner who came from Indiana in 1828 and gave his name to Baldwin's Prairie. Mathews describes him as 'naturally averse to hard labor,' living by his tavern and 'his genius for traffic and dicker.' His wife died soon after they arrived, the first death in the township. More families followed in 1829: William Tibbetts, Daniel Shellhammer, Caleb Calkins, a carpenter who walked to Pigeon Prairie to build houses for cash, Nathan G. O'Dell, whose son James, born January 10, 1830, was 'probably the first white child born in the township,' and George P. Schultz with his fourteen-year-old stepson Samuel King, who grew up to be the largest landowner in Porter with 784 acres.
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The Territorial Legislature created Porter on March 29, 1833, from part of Ontwa Township, and the first meeting met at the house of Othni Beardsley, who was elected supervisor. Rogers says the township was named for the territorial governor, though he calls him 'John B. Porter'. The governor at the time, as Mathews's own list of territorial officers shows, was George B. Porter, who served from 1831 until his death in 1834. In 1831 the Rinehart brothers, Lewis, Samuel and Jacob, bought out Beardsley's half-built sawmill and finished it, the first mill in the township. Rogers says they sold 110,000 feet of lumber in Chicago the next year.
The Chicago Road, cut through the southern tier of townships by the federal government beginning in 1827, made South Porter a highway. Between 1835 and 1845, Mathews says, an observer on a hill would rarely see fewer than one to three white-topped wagons at once, and often ten or twenty. 'Every resident on the road was, per force, a tavern-keeper.' Beardsley built a stage tavern in 1833 that burned in 1836, and the stage company then persuaded Jarius Hitchcox to open his house to travelers. Glover (1906) says the brick house still standing east of Union was that tavern, so crowded in its day that tables and chairs went outdoors to make room for beds. George Meacham, the county's first sheriff, once had seventy-five guests overnight. The traffic ended around 1852 when the railroads came.
In March 1865 Porter caught oil fever. Two strangers inspected the spring that fed William Brown's sawmill in Section 33 and offered to buy the place for a vineyard. A sawyer who had worked in the Canadian oil fields went to look and found oil floating on the water. Thousands came to see, and three Elkhart men paid $10,000 for the property before anyone discovered that the springs had been 'salted' with clay balls soaked in crude oil and pushed into the mud. The courts upheld the notes, and four years later Brown took the mill back for $1,700.
Porter's two hamlets grew at opposite corners. Union began with a post office in 1831 and a store in 1853, and Glover counted about 130 people there in 1906. Williamsville was laid out by Josiah Williams in 1848 or 1849. Porter shared in the antislavery story too: in 1850 it had the second-largest Black population in the county after Calvin, and Booker T. Washington's 1903 tour of Black farms took in part of Porter. The 2020 census counted 3,750 people.
