The story
Welcome to Baugo Township
Baugo Township lies on the county’s western line, south of the St. Joseph and the city of Elkhart, and takes its name from Baugo Creek. Its oldest settlement, Jamestown or “Jimtown,” grew up around a sawmill on the creek in the 1830s.
Chapman’s History of Elkhart County (1881) begins its township histories with Baugo. It says the creek’s name was a shortening of “Baubaugo,” meaning the “devil” or “devil river,” given because its current ran so swift in a freshet that even an expert canoeist dared not venture out, and that the settlers found the full word too long and cut it to Baugo.
The dates of settlement, Chapman admits, are “almost buried in obscurity.” On the word of Daniel Richason, he names William Mote as the first settler, in 1830, followed by John McNey, James Davis, John Barnes, a Mr. Kellog, Jacob Rupel and William Richason, and later Azel and Horace Meads and Isaac Morris. Deahl’s 1905 history repeats the list. Horace Randolph, whose portrait Chapman printed, came in the spring of 1836.
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William Richason and James Davis built a sawmill on the Baugo at Jamestown, on section 26, and Davis laid out a village there about 1835. Samuel Cotterel built the first frame house and opened the first store. The first schoolhouse in the township, of logs, stood at Jamestown, and the first election was held in the schoolhouse there in 1836, the township having been organized a little earlier. Chapman says the Methodist chapel was built in 1854 and a Baptist society built a church on section 27 in 1874.
By 1881 Chapman found Jamestown “almost abandoned,” and Deahl in 1905 called it a well-known locality with no business left, its people served by the city of Elkhart. Weaver (1916) noted its centralized township school and Methodist church. Today the area is known as Jimtown, and the township, with three cemeteries (Noffsinger, Osceola and St. Vincent de Paul), counted 9,473 people in the 2020 census.