The story
Welcome to Turkey Creek Township
Turkey Creek Township, in the northeast corner of Kosciusko County, holds Syracuse and Lake Wawasee. Henry Ward and Samuel Crawson dammed Turkey Creek here in 1832, before the land was even for sale, and the lake country became a summer resort.
The name is older than the township. In May 1833 the Elkhart County commissioners set apart all the territory south of that county as Turkey Creek Township, and in 1835 that Turkey Creek Township became Kosciusko County. The present township was organized on June 29, 1836, and before 1838, the 1887 county record says, it included what became Van Buren, Jefferson and Scott townships. It is bounded by Elkhart County on the north and Noble County on the east, and it abounds in lakes, some more than 100 feet deep.
Henry Ward and Samuel Crawson came in 1832 and built a dam across Turkey Creek at the foot of Syracuse Lake, meaning to build a mill once the treaty with the Indians was concluded and the land put on the market; Crawson’s log cabin of 1833 was the first house in the township. In 1834–35 settlers went farther south beyond Nine Mile Lake, Estin McClintock first, then John C. and Patrick Johnson, William Cassiday, Andrew Guy and others. Ward and Crawson built a sawmill in 1836, Joseph Cowell started a forge in 1834, a log school went up on the hill at Syracuse in 1836, and Crawson gave an acre west of the town for a cemetery that year.
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Syracuse was laid out on August 11, 1837, by Crawson and Ward and surveyed by Christopher D. Lightfoot. The first township election was held there at Henry Ward’s office in April 1838, and Syracuse was incorporated on October 19, 1876. The German Baptists organized in the south of the township in 1851 and built a church on section 14 in 1860, and a Church of God was founded east of Nine Mile Lake in 1858.
Nine Mile Lake took the name Wawasee, Royse writes, when Colonel Eli Lilly was asked to rename the lake and its club and chose the name of the old Flat Belly chief Wawas; signs bearing it were nailed on the Baltimore & Ohio station, and the railroad and the Post Office adopted it. Wawasee station became the center for summer visitors spread among the parks and hotels around the lake. The 2020 census counted 8,659 people in the township.