The story
Welcome to Milford
Milford grew on Turkey Creek where Judge Aaron M. Perine settled in 1834 and laid out a village two years later. The railroad came in 1870, a second line crossed a mile north, and the town was incorporated in the 1880s, for a time under the name Milford Junction.
Van Buren Township lies on the Elkhart County line, crossed by Turkey Creek and the lakes strung along it; much of it was once thought too marshy to be worth much. Its first settlers came in 1833 to Little Turkey Prairie in the south: Oliver Wright and his son Moses in March, William Felkner and his wife on March 20, and Elijah Miller, Richard Gawthrop, Samuel Street and the widow Sarah De Vault with five children later that year. Rachel Felkner, born May 15, 1833, was the first white child born in the township. The road from Logansport to Goshen was surveyed through it at about the same time, coming to Milford by way of Leesburg.
Early in the spring of 1834 Judge Aaron M. Perine settled on the site of Milford, and on April 10, 1836, he laid out the village on section 8, with James McCord as surveyor and William Felkner as one of the chain carriers. Perine kept the first hotel, Samuel Sackett opened a blacksmith shop in 1836, and Chipman and Doolittle were the first merchants. John Egbert built a sawmill on Turkey Creek about a mile east in 1837 and a gristmill in the village in 1839. A post office opened in 1839 with Dr. Nathan Chamberlain, the first physician, as postmaster. The town is said to take its name from a mill that stood near a ford.
Read the full story
Royse wrote that Milford “concluded its childhood” when the Cincinnati, Wabash & Michigan Railroad, later the Big Four, reached it in 1870. The Baltimore & Ohio crossed the township a mile to the north, where the junction called Milford Junction, or Shakespeare, had in 1887 only a few houses; the 1887 history thought the distance had held the town back. William Felkner put up the first brick business house in 1875, and more two-story brick stores followed in 1881 and 1882. A two-story brick school opened in the fall of 1878.
The town was incorporated in 1880 by one account, and in 1882 as Milford Junction by another. Its waterworks, near Main and Fourth streets, were built in 1888 as an addition to George R. Ogden’s old flour mill, and a 110-foot standpipe was added in 1902. The Milford Mail was founded on November 6, 1888, and the Miles & Higbee Bank in 1882. In 1907 the women of the Columbia Reading Circle began a library with a borrowed bookcase in a room of Hotel Milford; with $10,000 from Andrew Carnegie the present building at Main and Catherine streets was begun in 1918 and opened in January 1919.
Royse counted about 1,000 people in 1919, with Methodist, German Christian and Dunkard congregations and lodges of Odd Fellows and Masons. The 2020 census counted 1,614 people in Milford.
