The story
Welcome to Silver Creek Township
Silver Creek Township takes its name from a little stream that flows out of Magician Lake and shines over a pale bottom of marl. Its first settlers came only in the mid-1830s, cut off by a great swamp, and the nearest butter for sale was eleven miles away. Later its lakes made it a summer playground, from Magician Lake to the Sister Lakes.
The name came from the water. Mathews explains that Silver Creek, which rises in Magician Lake, was "so called from the silvery appearance of its waters, caused by a light coating of marl at the bottom," and the township took its name from the creek; Rogers adds that part of Magician Lake itself was once called Silver Lake. The township's outer lines were surveyed by William Brookfield in March 1827, but the sections inside were not run until April 1830. This was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States by the treaties of 1821 and 1828, and in 1836 Chief Leopold Pokagon, whose band was exempted from removal, bought land here and later built the township's first church, a Catholic chapel.
James McDaniel, a big, powerful frontiersman from North Carolina by way of Ohio, made the first land entry on December 16, 1834, and settled the next year in the oak openings of the northeast corner. He built the first house, plowed the first furrow and began a sawmill on Silver Creek, which he sold about 1838 to the Barneys before moving on to Arkansas. John Barney, later called Judge Barney, came in 1836, and in 1843 he opened a furniture factory on the creek that turned out spinning wheels. Jacob A. Suits arrived on September 1, 1836, and his son Adam later told how his mother sent him for butter: the nearest neighbor who had any, Mr. Barney said cheerfully, was "only eleven miles" away in Pokagon.
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Getting in was the hardest part. Rogers says the swamp along the Dowagiac Creek was so bad that settlers had to come round by Jenkins' bridge in Pokagon or travel nearly forty miles by way of Paw Paw. John G. A. Barney bought land in February 1838 but had to wait in Wayne Township until the next winter froze the swamp hard enough to carry his ox team across. When Timothy Treat's family came in from the south, they found a fork in the track where a gloomy emigrant ahead of them had peeled the bark from a tree and written in red chalk: "Turn to the left and go to the Devil."
The legislature organized the township by an act of March 20, 1837, ordering the first meeting held at James McDaniel's house. The voters met that April and elected Timothy Treat supervisor, Benjamin Dunning treasurer and James Allen clerk. The same month John McDaniel and Delilah Mendenhall rode on horseback to the county seat to be married by Squire Joseph Harper, the township's first wedding; Mathews notes that the groom came home in a cheerful condition, "whether caused by the successful termination of his matrimonial venture or from other causes is not stated." John Woolman Sr., the first resident surveyor, laid out the first road for John Barney in 1837 or 1838, and a township contract of 1841 shows James Allen promising to clear eighty rods of the Pokagon road four rods wide by June.
Schools and churches followed. The school inspectors reported four districts in 1839, with twenty-nine scholars in District No. 1, learning from Webster's spelling book, the English Reader, Olney's Geography and Smiley's Arithmetic. A Methodist class formed in 1843 and met for years in the log schoolhouse at Indian Lake, and a First Church of Christ organized in 1861 built its church in 1865 for $2,980. From 1849 Irish Catholic families such as the Dalys and the Cullinanes settled near the Catholic church. Erastus White, who came in 1847, was said to have killed the largest deer ever shot in that part of the county, one that dressed 300 pounds.
Mills and farms gave the township its working life. The township's own history says Eleazer B. Foster ran a sawmill on the creek and made black walnut gun stocks for the government during the Civil War, and John Hoyt built the Red Mill, which served farmers for half a century. William Bilderback, who settled on section 34 in 1850, lost his sons Peter J. and William W. in the Civil War. In the west, the Cushing family took up land in the 1850s, and the crossroads where William Cushing kept a store, with a school and a post office, became Cushing Corners.
By 1900 the lakes were drawing visitors. Glover records the Maple Island Resort plat on an island in Magician Lake in 1896, Magician Beach in 1901 and Highland Beach on Indian Lake in 1905, and the township today is still largely agricultural, with summer cottages and resorts around the Sister Lakes. Indian Lake Cemetery, in use since the 1840s and deeded to the township by William Ridenour in 1852, holds many of the first settlers and the pioneering surgeon Dr. Alice Conklin. The 2020 census counted 3,051 residents.
