The story
Welcome to Middlebury Township
Middlebury Township, in the northeast of the county, rolls along the Little Elkhart River. Chapman called it one of the finest townships in the county for farming, and its town of Middlebury was laid out in the 1830s on the road from Goshen to White Pigeon.
The first pioneers were Enoch Woodbridge and his family, from Vermont, who settled in 1832, Chapman (1881) says. Others came north and south of the future town, and a Mr. Whittlesy settled on the state road east of it beside the Trusdell family. Solomon L. Hixon, whose portrait Chapman printed and from whom much of the township’s history came, arrived on March 4, 1834, and was then the oldest pioneer still living there. Deahl (1905) adds that James P. White came in 1830.
The town of Middlebury says the township was organized in 1834. The Woodbridges built a sawmill in the spring of 1834 and a flour mill two years later. The pioneers held preaching and prayer meetings in their houses. At Sugar Grove, about three and a half miles southeast of Middlebury, the New School Presbyterians built a church in 1842 that the German Baptists later bought, and a Lutheran church stood on section 27.
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In 1835 surveyors staked out the proposed Buffalo & Mississippi Railroad near the town, Chapman says, but the line was abandoned, and for decades the nearest station was Vistula, on the Lake Shore. The branch railroad reached Middlebury in 1889. Wikipedia, citing the town, says the first Amish families came in 1841 from Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Today the township includes the town of Middlebury and the lake settlement of Lake Grange, with five cemeteries, among them Forest Grove, Grace Lawn and Miller. The 2020 census counted 8,905 people.