The story
Welcome to York Township
York Township, in the county’s northeast corner, was settled from 1833 by families who came mostly from New York and named it for their home state. Its old mill on the Little Elkhart at Bonneyville is now part of the Elkhart County park system.
Chapman (1881) says the first settlement aimed at real improvement was made by William Hunter in 1833, in the south of the township near the Little Elkhart. In 1834 he was joined by J. N. Brown, J. and William Cummins, William Hall, Friend Curtis, David Ebi, Hiram Chase, E. Bonney, John and Ruby Van Frank, Edward Joyce and A. Arnold, who settled on the Vistula road. They petitioned for a new township, cut from Middlebury, and because most had come from New York it was named York.
In April 1837 an election at Friend Curtis’s house chose William K. Cummins justice of the peace. That year Nathan Whipple and Edward Bonney built a flour mill and sawmill on the Little Elkhart about three miles east of Bristol, still running in 1880. Samuel Ebi’s distillery ran for about thirty years, to 1865. The first school building went up on section 21 in 1837, and Rev. Eli Garrison organized a Baptist church in 1836; his death in April 1837 is said to have been the township’s first.
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When the Lake Shore railroad crossed the northwest corner about 1851, people from Middlebury won a depot at a woodshed by the track. It was called Middlebury Station until a post office was granted and William Caldwell suggested the name Vistula, probably from the old Vistula road. The place was laid out in 1865 and, Deahl (1905) says, never grew beyond a hamlet of under a hundred people.
The hills of York grew fruit, Chapman says, and the township remains rural, with 4,291 people in the 2020 census. Bonneyville Mill was listed on the National Register in 1976.