The story
Welcome to Harrison Township
Harrison Township, in the middle of the county’s west half, is farm country that Deahl in 1905 called the “agricultural paradise of Elkhart County,” with ten churches and no post office. It took its name from the ten votes its first settlers cast for William Henry Harrison in 1836.
Daniel B. Stutsman was the first settler, Chapman (1881) says, coming in 1831; his was “the first white man’s ax” heard in the township, and for a long while his was the only white family. Chapman tells of the day Stutsman nearly shot a Potawatomi man he took for a turkey, who leapt up crying “good che-mo-ko-mon” (good white man). In 1833 and 1834 David Y. Miller, Conrad Brumbaugh, James and William Stewart and Samuel Buchanan settled, and in 1835 James McDowell and Christian S. Farber.
By the spring of 1836 there were ten families, and their ten voters organized the township. At the first election, that November, all ten votes were Whig and all went to Gen. Harrison, and from that the township took its name. William Stewart was the first justice of the peace, elected in 1840. The settlers built a log schoolhouse in 1838.
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Religious meetings were held in schoolhouses until 1855, when Daniel B. Stutsman and Abraham Teeter built a Mennonite church on section 28. The Dunkards built on section 26 in 1862 and the Mennonites another church there in 1868. A post office called Cabin Hill opened in the west of the township about 1847, and a later one at the crossroads hamlet of Southwest, at the corners of sections 26, 27 and 34 near the Logansport road, until rural delivery replaced it.
Harrison is still farm country, and the 2020 census counted 3,547 people. Its cemeteries include Hoke, Inbody, Stutsman and Yellow Creek, and St. John’s Lutheran Church and the Joseph J. Rohrer Farm are on the National Register.