The story
Welcome to Jefferson Township
Jefferson Township, in the northwest corner of Kosciusko County on the Elkhart County line, was settled in 1836. A broad marsh divided its first two neighborhoods, and its first election was decided by a single legal vote.
Jefferson Township was organized on March 8, 1838; the 1887 county record says that until then its territory had been part of Turkey Creek Township. Elkhart County bounds it on the north, Van Buren on the east, and Prairie and Scott on the south and west. Before settlement it was mostly heavy timber, but a marsh half a mile to a mile wide ran across the whole township from east to west; it has since been drained and farmed.
Jacob Brumbaugh came from Elkhart County with his family in October 1836, built the first log cabin and planted a crop the next spring. Late that fall John Leatherman, Andrew Sheely, James Martin, James Simpson and George Platter settled with their families on sections 1 and 2, north of the marsh near the Elkhart County line. In the summer of 1837 David and Samuel McKibbin, Joseph Alexander and Isaac Bliven settled south of it, and for a time, Royse writes, neither neighborhood knew the other was there.
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The first township election was held at David McKibbin’s house in April 1838. Of the five votes cast, four were illegal because the voters had not lived there long enough, so Isaac Bliven’s single vote elected a justice of the peace, a constable, two road supervisors, three overseers of the poor and an inspector. A German Baptist society was organized at Jacob Brumbaugh’s house in the spring of 1837, with John Leatherman as its pastor until his death in 1867; a Methodist class formed south of the marsh in 1838; and James Martin taught the first school in 1840, in a log building on section 11.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad cuts across a tip of the township in the northeast, and David Brumbaugh laid out Gravelton as a station on it in 1876, opening its first store; the German Baptists built a church there the same year. In 1915 Jefferson joined Van Buren Township and Milford in supporting the Milford public library. The township is farm country today, and the 2020 census counted 1,963 people in it.