The story
Welcome to Union
Union sits on US 12, the old Chicago road, at the northwest edge of Baldwin's Prairie in southern Porter Township. It began as a post office in a farmhouse and a stage tavern where travelers slept on the floor, and it has never been incorporated. Even so, as Glover wrote in 1906, it has "continued from pioneer days" as the center for the farms around it.
This was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821. Glover (1906) called Baldwin's Prairie "one of the most delightful landscapes in Cass county," a level plain he believed had once been the bed of a lake. Sections 7 and 8 of south Porter, he wrote, were among the first entered in this part of the county, and by 1831 Elam Beardsley, James Hitchcock, Othni Beardsley, John Baldwin, Chester Sage, Jacob Charles, and Nathan and William Tibbits had all taken up land on the prairie. Mathews (1882) says John Baldwin, who came from Indiana in 1828, kept the first tavern, feeding travelers' horses from holes cut in an old log.
Union grew out of the mail and the stage line. In 1831 Jacob Charles became postmaster and kept the post office in his own house, and after a few moves it settled at the present village. In 1833 Othni Beardsley built a tavern there that became a regular station for the stage coaches. It burned in 1836, and the stage company persuaded Jarius Hitchcox to open his house as a tavern instead. Mathews writes that it was often so crowded that chairs and tables were set outdoors to make room for beds on the floor. Glover says the Hitchcox brick house, on the north side of the road at the east end of the village, had sheltered hundreds of emigrants and was "one of the most historic places in Cass county," with long sheds behind it for the stage horses and coaches.
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Those were the years when, as Mathews puts it, every resident on the Chicago road was "per force, a tavern-keeper." Between 1835 and 1845 the road was lined with white-covered wagons. Standing on a rise, you could seldom see fewer than one to three, and ten or twenty in sight at once was nothing unusual. George Meacham once put up seventy-five guests in his house in a single night. The rush ended about 1852, when the railroads came and the emigrant traffic on the road died away.
The pioneers of Union were hardy people. In December 1831 Lewis Rinehart and his wife were caught by a snowstorm at nightfall on a trail marked only by blazed trees. He scraped the snow from under a low-branched tree, wrapped his wife and baby son in blankets, and kept himself from freezing by walking all night. The baby, Samuel M. Rinehart, grew up to live at Union. Glover's informant in 1906, he was then the village's longest resident and president of the Cass County Pioneer Society, and he could remember hearing the stage horn announce the coach.
The village filled in slowly. William B. Dibble opened a small grocery in 1853, and Daniel Williams brought in a general stock of goods. Rogers (1875) thought of Union as a newer place begun about 1860, and "an enterprising go-ahead" one. The Baldwin's Prairie Baptist Church was organized in February 1857 by Rev. Jacob Price and later built a brick house of worship. The Methodists built a church in 1858 whose deed said it should be free to other Christian denominations when the Methodists were not using it, and from 1866 the Free-Will Baptists met there. Mathews counted about 100 people in 1882, with two general stores, a blacksmith and wagon shop, a shoe shop and two carpenter shops.
In 1906 Glover found about 130 people, two stores, a blacksmith shop and an implement house, and a post office kept by William Eby while rural mail routes were closing post offices in other villages. The townsfolk had high hopes for a promised electric railway from South Bend to Kalamazoo. Porter Township's history also belongs to the story of freedom. A State Bar marker at the Cass County courthouse notes that from 1829 Quakers and free Black settlers lived in Penn, Calvin and Porter townships and that they were "the backbone of the Underground Railroad." Today Union is still Porter Township's commercial center, where the township hall stands. The 2020 census counted 3,750 people in the whole township.
