The story
Welcome to Elkhart Township
Elkhart Township was the other half of the county when it was divided in 1830, and it holds Goshen, the county seat. South of the city lie Elkhart Prairie, where the first settlers came, and the old mill village of Waterford.
When the Board of Justices divided the county in 1830, all the land southeast of Concord became Elkhart Township, with James Beck as constable and Azel Sparklin as inspector of elections; its elections were held in the schoolhouse on Elkhart Plain. The township was later reduced as new ones were formed, and in 1880 it had 5,431 people, 3,968 of them in Goshen.
Chapman (1881) names Elias Riggs and William Simpson as the first settlers, after they sold their claims on the prairie to Col. John Jackson in 1829 and moved across the line. Mrs. Susan Nickerson, later Mrs. Wogoman, was there in June 1828 and John B. Cripe in March 1829, along with Balser Hess and his brothers, William Felkner, Solomon Hockert and Major Violett. John H. Violett, born November 22, 1829, was the first white boy born in the township. The first preachers were Rev. E. Felton and Azel Sparklin, Methodists; Daniel Cripe, a Dunkard; and Balser Hess, a Baptist. The German Baptist church was organized in 1834.
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Waterford, three miles south of Goshen, grew around a grist mill that Judge Elias Baker built in 1833. Cephas Hawks bought it in 1836, and in 1838 David Ballentine and the two Cephas Hawkses laid out the village. Deahl (1905) lists a sawmill, a pump factory, a woolen factory, a distillery, a fulling works and a rake and fork factory there; when the Goshen canal was finished in 1868 the Hawks mill moved to the city, and Waterford declined. Just north of it the Violett family kept a grove of about fifty acres of primeval oak.
The township is now mostly Goshen and its edges, and the 2020 census counted 38,388 people. Its seven cemeteries include Elkhart Prairie, Oak Ridge, Sparklin and Violett, and the Dierdorff Farmstead was listed on the National Register in 2011.