The story
Welcome to Bloomfield Township
Bloomfield Township surrounds LaGrange, the county seat, in the middle of the county. Its rolling, once heavily wooded land was taken up in a rush in the mid-1830s, and the creeks that run north through it to the Pigeon River once turned a string of small mills.
Bloomfield covers surveyed Township 37 North, Range 10 East, a full thirty-six sections, with Greenfield and Lima to the north, Springfield to the east, Johnson to the south and Clay to the west. The 1882 history says the land was surveyed in July 1831 by Deputy Surveyor George W. Harrison and was covered with oak, beech, hickory, ash, elm and walnut. The south and center are rolling and in places hilly; the north is level and sandy. The Pigeon River crosses the north-east corner, and Fly Creek and its branches run north through the township to join it near Ontario. Fish, Sloan and Cline lakes lie within it.
The first land bought from the government was entered at Fort Wayne on March 13, 1833, by Hugh R. Hunter, in section 1. The first settler was probably David Hanson, who came in 1833 to section 26 and made the first brick in the county. Most of the land was taken up in 1834–36, mostly by families from New York and Ohio, with a few from Virginia and Maryland, and at the beginning of 1836 thirty families lived here, among them the Hills, Carls, Herns, Davidsons and Jewetts. Daniel Harding built the first sawmill in 1835 in section 17, and Newton’s, Green’s and Hill’s mills followed on Fly Creek along the old Fort Wayne road.
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The county commissioners created the township in May 1835, and an election for justice of the peace was held at the house of Moses J. Hill in June; Hill was inspector of the election and was elected. The first general election was held on April 3, 1837, at Abel Mattoon’s house in section 21. Johnson Township, attached to Bloomfield at first, was set off in 1837. The Rev. Thomas B. Connelly, a Methodist from Maryland, organized the Bethel Church in the east part of the township in 1835 and built a chapel of hewed logs in 1852. The first schoolhouse, of logs, went up in the spring of 1838 in section 23, where Almira Crandall taught that summer.
Two villages were platted in 1836 and neither prospered. William C. Tillman laid out Burlington in section 1 and sold corner lots in the East from a handsome map showing the Pigeon River big enough for shipping; the families who came found a swamp with half the lots under water and moved on. Moses J. Hill and Ivory Crandall platted Bloomfield, later called Hill’s Corners, on the Fort Wayne road on September 14, 1836; it hoped for the county seat but lost it, and the railroad passed it by. The town of LaGrange, laid out the same year in sections 19 and 30, became the county seat in 1844.
The township has always been farm country around the county seat. Ford (1920) counted 1,812 people in 1890 and 923 in 1910, not counting the town. The Bloomfield Township Graded School on U.S. 20 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. The 2020 census counted 5,746 people in the township, LaGrange included.