The story
Welcome to Jackson Township
Jackson Township, on the county’s south line, is named for Col. John Jackson, a War of 1812 soldier who came back in 1829 to settle on Elkhart Prairie. Its village of New Paris grew where two railroads crossed.
Chapman (1881) divides the township into three parts by the Elkhart River and Turkey Creek. In the east lay Elkhart Prairie, where Col. John Jackson made the first settlement. Deahl (1905) says Jackson had marched north from Fort Wayne in September 1812 with troops who burned the village of the Potawatomi chief O-nox-see near the site of Benton, and was taken with the country. In January 1829 he came back with his family, found Elias Riggs and William Simpson on the land he had chosen, and paid them fifty dollars for their claims. Thompson Weybright and Matthew Rippey soon followed.
In the middle, between the river and Turkey Creek, lay the Barrens, settled by John Rohrer, David Rodibaugh, Jonathan Wyland, Benjamin Bennett, Daniel Studebaker and others; to the west the Whitehead settlement of 1831 and 1832; and to the south the Southern Barrens. Buzzard’s Hill, Chapman says, was the highest point in the county, with a view of the Goshen courthouse. The township was formed in May 1832, with Joseph Cowan as first trustee and first postmaster.
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A Mr. Ingle built a sawmill near the Benton line in 1831, and Jonathan Wyland built a sawmill and then a grist mill on the river in section 2, the start of the village known as Wyland’s Mills and later Baintertown. Isaac Abshire and Enoch Wright laid out New Paris on sections 9 and 10 in 1838. The German Baptists organized Solomon’s Creek Church in 1856 and built one of the largest meeting houses in northern Indiana in 1864, and Methodist classes met from about 1832.
The Cincinnati, Wabash & Michigan railroad reached New Paris in 1870 and the Wabash in 1892–1893, and by 1905 the village had about five hundred people. The Bainter Town cemetery, opened in 1832, survives from the old mill village, and the 2020 census counted 4,996 people in the township.