The story
Welcome to Cleveland Township
Cleveland Township lies in the county’s northwest corner, between the Michigan line and the St. Joseph River, west of Elkhart. Its first settlers came about 1830 to Cobert’s Creek, and a tavern in Francis Rork’s cabin was its first gathering place.
Cleveland was cut from Concord Township in 1835, Chapman (1881) says, taking in the land between the Michigan line and the St. Joseph River, from St. Joseph County east to Washington Township, and was named for the “Forest City” in Ohio. In the winter of 1837–1838 the eastern part was set off as Osolo Township.
About 1830 Francis Rork, John and Frank Bashford and a Mr. Bogart took up land on Cobert’s Creek in the west of the township, and Rork’s house, about the first built, served for a time as a public house. In 1834 came Mr. Dibble, Mr. Smith, D. J. and R. B. Clark, Silas T. Mattox and others, and in the fall of 1835 John and T. H. Evans, Walter Strong, Joseph Call, Samuel Houghland and Mr. Ormsby. T. H. Evans, born in Vermont in 1803, was still farming his first land in 1880.
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The first school was taught in 1835 in Rork’s cabin, and the second term by Wealthy Evans, then only a girl. The first election was held at T. H. Evans’s house, with Smith and Dibble chosen justices of the peace. The Redfields of New York bought a large tract here and in Michigan in 1835, and George Ervin later sold land on the western edge to Notre Dame. James High built a flour mill on Cobert’s Creek in 1856.
The first church was a Methodist one on the county line. In 1878 the people of the northern part, known as Yankeetown, organized and built a church, dedicated December 15, 1878, and the Methodists built another in an oak grove on section 2. Today much of Cleveland is suburban Elkhart, and the 2020 census counted 12,858 people. Carlton and California Road cemeteries lie in the township.