The story
Welcome to Millersburg
Millersburg was laid out in 1855 by Solomon Miller, a Black Hawk War captain, on his own farm beside the coming Lake Shore railroad. It grew as a stock and grain shipping town in the farm country of Clinton Township, now home to many Amish families.
Clinton Township was slow to make a town. Deahl (1905) explains that its farmers already traded at Middlebury, Goshen, Waterford and Benton, and that its Amish and Dunkard settlers worshipped for years in private houses. Solomon Miller, born in Tennessee in 1803 and a captain in the Black Hawk War, bought land on section 34 in 1834, came back to live on it in 1842, and in 1855 laid out the town that bears his name. J. R. McCord surveyed it, and the first building on the plat was the frame house of Miller’s son, James C. Miller.
Chapman (1881) says Miller planned the town in the winter of 1855 to draw trade from older inland towns, naming streets Walnut, Cook, Clinton and Jefferson. David Eldridge built the second house and the first store. The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern air line was projected in 1855 and, by Chapman’s account, completed in 1856; Brice Larimer was station agent for more than twenty years, and a new depot was built in 1878.
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The town grew slowly through the war years and quickly after, with stores, a grist mill, a sawmill and planing mill, and about five hundred people by 1880. The Lutheran church was begun in 1867, a German Reformed church was finished in 1868, and Chapman found a Roman Catholic church just built and dedicated in 1880. The first schoolhouse was built in 1855 and a new one in 1878. Millersburg was incorporated in 1870 by Deahl’s and Weaver’s accounts, and in 1892 the Wabash gave it a second railroad. The Millersburg Grit was founded in 1892.
Deahl reprints the Grit’s account of the 1905 Four Generations Reunion, when more than a thousand people ate at a barbecue and old residents spoke on the town’s early history. Wikipedia notes that Millersburg was a K–12 school district until Fairfield Junior-Senior High School opened in 1968. The 2020 census counted 957 people.