The story
Welcome to Clearspring Township
Clearspring Township, on the county’s south line, takes its name from a big spring that was famous among the Potawatomi and the backwoodsmen. Its south-west corner is part of the rich Haw Patch, and its pioneers included a botanic doctor who left his fortune to the county’s poor and the man who brought peppermint to LaGrange County.
Clearspring covers surveyed Township 36 North, Range 9 East, with Clay to the north, Johnson to the east, Noble County to the south and Eden to the west. It belonged to Eden Township until the county commissioners set it off on March 6, 1837; fifteen or twenty men voted at the first election. The 1874 atlas says the township was named for ‘a very fine, large spring’ on Charles Roy’s place, ‘famous among the Indians and backwoodsmen half a century ago and more.’ Most of it was dense forest of maple, oak, hickory and beech; the open Haw Patch in the south-west corner first drew the land-lookers, and marshy lakes along the east side feed a branch of the Elkhart River.
Anthony Nelson came from Ohio in 1829, lived first in Elkhart County, and in 1831 moved to a 160-acre tract here, the first permanent settler. Dr. David Rogers, a botanic physician from Wayne County, New York, came in 1833 and entered 1,280 acres in Clearspring and Eden. He gathered roots and herbs for twenty years and sold extracts to Eastern firms, sometimes living in a cave on his land in section 22. When he died in 1871 he left his property to the county for the poor, and the county founded the Rogers Orphan Home. His marble shaft on a hill over the Haw Patch road reads that he ‘gave medicine without money and without price.’
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Norman Sessions came to section 27 in 1834, and John Sprout, Nathan Bishop, a Free-Will Baptist preacher from South Carolina, and Amos Newhouse of Virginia followed in 1834–35. Elijah Pixley of Union County, Indiana, settled in section 28 in 1835, and on his land were the first schoolhouse, burying ground and church. A large immigration came in 1836, among them Charles Roy, who raised a 700-tree orchard and distilled peppermint oil. On October 3, 1836, William Dallas arrived with a sister and fourteen motherless children and in 1837 built ‘Uncle Billy’s Corn-Cracker,’ a tiny gristmill of whitewood logs on the Elkhart River.
Hawley Peck, born in Connecticut in 1810, brought the first peppermint roots to the county in a sack from Constantine, Michigan, about 1847, and grew mint in section 27; one year he hauled 1,000 pounds of oil to market and was paid $5,000. Anna Maria Crosby taught the first school in a log house on Charles Roy’s land in the fall of 1839, for $1.25 a week and board. When horse thieves and counterfeiters troubled the Haw Patch, the ‘Clearspring and Eden Detective Police’ was organized at Francis Ditman’s house on March 1, 1858.
The Wabash Railroad crossed the south of the township in 1893, and the east half of the new town of Topeka grew up in its south-west corner, with a siding at Eddy near Atwood Lake. Ford counted 1,509 people in 1890 and 1,480 in 1910, Topeka included. The 2020 census counted 4,662 people in Clearspring Township.