The story
Welcome to Locke Township
Locke Township, in the southwest corner of the county, is only half a Congressional township and was the last to be organized. It was named for its first settler, Samuel Lockwood of Vermont, and holds the west half of Nappanee.
Chapman (1881) says Samuel Lockwood came in the fall of 1836 from Vermont with his wife and six children, by water to Milwaukee and then overland through the village of Chicago. They lived ten days in their log hut before any neighbor came. Abner Hibray and John Pitts arrived from New York and settled on section 2. Lockwood died in 1846 and his wife in 1858, and both were buried on their farm. James Berry came in 1839, and Morlan Albin, Daniel McCoy, Philip Reed and others by 1840.
At first the settlers voted in Harrison, then in Union and then in Olive; Chapman says they were set off to themselves probably about the spring of 1843, and the first election was held in a log schoolhouse on section 14, with nine voters. The first church was a Union church for all denominations on section 22. A post office called Locke, or Five Points, opened at Daniel McCoy’s about 1847.
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The township settled slowly in thick timber, and in 1880 Chapman still saw logs and stumps smoking in summer. The village of Locke was laid out in 1867 by George W. Eby, M. H. Morlan and L. B. Winder, and for a few years it had stores, mills and three physicians. When the Baltimore & Ohio crossed the south edge of the township in 1874 and Nappanee was laid out on its line, Locke faded; Deahl (1905) found twenty-five or thirty people there and says it had once been called Whistlertown.
Locke Township counted 1,364 people in 1880 and 4,328 in the 2020 census. The North Union and South Union cemeteries, beside churches of the same names, date from its early years.