The story
Welcome to Bristol
Bristol stands on a plain above the St. Joseph River where the Little Elkhart runs in, one of the oldest towns in the county. Its dams drove mills in the 1840s, its hills grew grapes and cherries for the Lake Shore trains, and its old school is now the county’s history museum.
Chapman (1881) and Deahl (1905) agree that James Nicholson and his sons Samuel V., David T. and George made the first claims here in 1829, “in a graceful bend” of the river near the mouth of the Little Elkhart, joined by their relatives Peter Marmen and Aaron Brown. Reuben Bronson and his brother-in-law James Cathcart followed. Chapman says Samuel P. Judson, a merchant from Buffalo, New York, came in 1831 and bought Bronson’s land, and that Judson, L. M. Alverson and Hiram Doolittle laid out and recorded the original plat; Deahl puts the platting about 1835. Wikipedia, citing Baker’s From Needmore to Prosperity, says the town was named for Bristol, England.
Dr. H. H. Fowler, the first physician, was the first postmaster, and Chapman says the weekly mail came in the coat pockets of Jacob Evans. Miss Philossa Wheeler taught in a double log cabin before the first schoolhouse was built in 1838. Baptist preachers held a protracted meeting in 1837 in the unfinished parlor of the hotel that Delos Gannett built in 1836 and Joseph Wheeler kept. The Goshen Express of March 4, 1837, thought Bristol, “on a beautiful plain, elevated about forty feet above the river,” was not excelled as a town site by any other on the St. Joseph.
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The first dam across the St. Joseph was built in 1841, and Thomas Wheeler, S. P. Judson, the Hanchels and Sewell Thompson put up mills on it, including Thompson’s woolen mill. George Adams, recalling 1848 for Deahl, said there was then more business in Bristol than in Elkhart, with wheat wagons crowding his father’s “barn hotel.” The Episcopal church was built in 1849, largely through Mrs. Jannette Judson, and the Methodist and Presbyterian churches followed in 1850.
The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern made Bristol a shipping point. Chapman describes the nurseries and vineyards on the hills of Washington Township, and Deahl says that in 1905 about two hundred thousand cases of small fruit and peaches were shipped from the Bristol depot in a full season. The Mosier brothers built the opera house in 1896 and 1897, and a brick Union School was finished in 1904. The former Bristol–Washington Township School is now home to the Elkhart County Historical Museum, founded in 1968. The 2020 census counted 1,789 people in the town.
