The story
Welcome to Union Township
Union Township, on the county’s south line west of Jackson, is level, rich farm land once full of swamps and timber. Deahl in 1905 found a church in sight from nearly every point, and its people farming and worshipping without a town until the railroads came.
Daniel Bainter built the first cabin in April 1834, Chapman (1881) says, sixteen feet square of split logs on section 15, with a door hung on wooden hinges. He had passed through the county with his father in 1827 on the way to the site of South Bend. A few years later John Walburn drove a wagon from Ohio, cutting his road for miles, and camped under a pole shed until his cabin was raised. Daniel Landers, John Pippinger, Christ Louder, Mr. Sheline, Cotner Strycker and the Stumps followed.
The township was organized in the spring of 1837, with the first election in Bainter’s cabin, and the first township schoolhouse, of logs, was built that summer at Union Center. Daniel Stuckman and Mary Elson were married on June 3, 1837. Chapman tells of Daniel Ulery, who said he killed more than five hundred deer in the county, and once shot his own horse by accident. The German Baptists, whose first sermon was preached in Stouder’s cabin by Daniel Cripe, built a brick church at Union Center in 1866, with the township cemetery beside it.
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Deahl mentions Stumptown on section 22, named for Abram Stump, who dammed a stream and built a mill there, with a Dunkard church and old burying ground at the crossroads. In 1892, when the Wabash crossed the northeast corner, Messrs. Blosser and Bechtel promoted the village of Foraker on Samuel Yoder’s land. The Baltimore & Ohio crossed the south tier of sections in 1874, and the east half of Nappanee lies in section 31.
A tamarack swamp of six or eight square miles in the southeast was the last large waste land in 1881, and farmers were draining the rest. The 2020 census counted 6,250 people in the township.