The story
Welcome to Olive Township
Olive Township lies on the county’s western line, south of Baugo, a heavily timbered country cleared by settlers of the 1830s. Its first ballot box was a blue sugar bowl, and its village of Wakarusa began as Salem in 1852.
Jacob Sailor was the first settler, early in 1834, Chapman (1881) and Deahl (1905) agree, followed by Cornelius Terwilliger, Frederick Morris, Samuel and Levi Martin and David Allen, and soon by Daniel Mikel, who had been in the county since 1829. The township once covered thirty-six sections, but about 1840, Chapman says, its western half was given to St. Joseph County.
Chapman says these settlers organized the township in the spring of 1836, and that Terwilliger proposed the name Olive, which all agreed to. The first election was held in April 1837 at Isaac Morris’s house, with an old sugar bowl for a ballot box; of twelve votes only one, Daniel Mikel’s, was Whig. Deahl dates the formal organization to 1839 and says six voters cast their ballots into a blue porcelain sugar bowl that Cornelius Morris still treasured in 1905.
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The first school was a log cabin on section 11. Religious meetings were held in schoolhouses and houses until 1866, when the Lutherans built a church at Wakarusa; the Baptists followed in 1867, the Christians in 1870 and the Methodists in 1874. The Mennonites worshipped on section 2, where Chapman says the township’s first frame church went up in 1851 and a cemetery was laid out in 1855. The Mount Olive post office opened in 1849 at Harvey Bly’s cabin.
Chapman says Olive sent more soldiers to the Civil War, for its population, than any other township in the county. Its land, once heavily timbered, sold for sixty to eighty dollars an acre by 1880. Wakarusa, platted as Salem in 1852, lies partly in the township, and the 2020 census counted 3,388 people. Pletcher and Shutts cemeteries are in the township.