The story
Welcome to Benton Township
Benton Township fills the southeast corner of Elkhart County, rich farm land cut by the Elkhart River. Its village of Benton, laid out in 1832, was one of the busiest places in the county before the railroads passed it by.
Chapman (1881) describes Benton as Township 35 North, Range 7 East, level land of sandy loam once covered with oak, maple, beech and poplar, crossed by the Elkhart River and by Solomon and Stony creeks. It was settled, he says, mostly by families from the German settlements of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and half the people of 1880 could still speak Pennsylvania German.
Matthew Boyd was the first settler. Chapman says he prospected in 1828, brought his family in 1829 to the spot where the village stands, and ran a canoe ferry across the Elkhart; his pre-emption certificate of August 2, 1831, bore Andrew Jackson’s signature. Deahl (1905) dates Boyd’s coming to 1827. Martin Vance, Solomon Hockert, Peter Darr, the Otts, John Longacre and the Judays followed. In September 1812, during the war with Britain, American troops crossed the Elkhart near the site of Benton and burned the Potawatomi town of the chief O-nox-see; Deahl places the town near Benton, Chapman on a farm in Jackson Township.
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Henry Beane laid out the village in 1832 on John Longacre’s land. James Banta and Jesse D. Vail opened a store about 1830, the Elkhart Prairie post office moved to Benton in 1836 with Dr. F. W. Taylor as postmaster, Peter Darr built a sawmill in 1836, and the Baptists put up the first church in 1838. The Goshen Express of March 1837 described two stores, several groceries, a public house and a physician. The Fort Wayne road ran through the village.
Then Goshen grew and the railroads went elsewhere. Deahl calls Benton’s story one of “arrested development”; the Wabash arrived in 1892 with its station north of the village, and by 1905 about 175 people lived there. Chapman records the great forest fire of the year of the Chicago fire, 1871, when sparks from locomotives set the drought-dry muck burning and more than a thousand acres of timber were lost. The township, which also holds the south part of Millersburg, counted 3,200 people in 2020.