The story
Welcome to Sumnerville
Sumnerville is the old mill village of Pokagon Township, older than its railroad neighbor Pokagon by more than twenty years. It grew around Isaac Sumner's sawmill and gristmill where two creeks meet, hosted a revival that Methodists long remembered, and keeps the graves of the county's first settlers.
The land around Sumnerville was Potawatomi country, given up by the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, and it was among the first in Cass County to see white settlement. Uzziel Putnam settled on Pokagon Prairie nearby in 1825, and Baldwin Jenkins spent his first winter, that same year, a short distance north of where the village would stand. A road from the Sumnerville neighborhood to Niles, the settlers' market town, was opened about 1831.
The village owes its existence to water power. Glover explains that Sumnerville sits where Pokagon Creek joins Dowagiac Creek, and that the heavy timber nearby made a mill worth building. Isaac Sumner put up a sawmill in 1835 and a gristmill two years later. With Junius H. Hatch he platted the village, which was recorded in August 1836 under Sumner's name. Alexander Davis opened the first store about the same time, and Peabody Cook kept the first tavern, starting about 1835. In 1848 Russel Cook and John R. Connine opened another store.
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A post office was established at Sumnerville after the first one at Pokagon, and Sumnerville became a small center for doctors as well. Mathews lists a succession of physicians who practiced there, one of whom, a Union veteran captured at Pittsburg Landing, set up practice in the village in the early 1870s after graduating from the University of Michigan.
The village is remembered in Methodist history for a revival. In the autumn of 1839 the Michigan Conference sent the Reverend Franklin Gage as a missionary to the whole southwest corner of the state, and the 'great revival of Sumnerville' that followed produced a class formed in the spring of 1840, which Mathews calls the first in that part of Michigan. The congregation met in a schoolhouse that became almost sacred to them, until it grew so run-down that they built a church, completed in 1854.
Rogers counted the village's business in 1875: a general store, a hotel, two blacksmith shops, a wagon maker, a photographer, a gristmill with three run of stone, a woolen factory, a water-powered sawmill, and Free Will Baptist and Methodist churches. A gazetteer of 1880 gave the population as 184. The railroad, though, had gone through a mile and a half away in 1846, and when William Baldwin laid out the village of Pokagon beside the tracks in 1858 the new town drew off the trade. Glover in 1906 called the two villages an excellent study in how roads, streams and railroads make and unmake communities, and reckoned Sumnerville's population at about 150.
The Sumnerville Cemetery holds many of Pokagon's pioneers. A Michigan historical marker says its earliest marked grave, of Emily Markham, dates from 1830, and that Uzziel and Anna Putnam, the county's first settlers, are buried there, along with Charity Thompson, widow of Berrien County's first settler, veterans from the War of 1812 onward, and the prominent African American families of Ash, Gault, Mitchem and Mitchell. Pokagon Township has cared for the cemetery since 1990.