The story
Welcome to Eden Township
Eden Township, in the county’s south-west corner, holds most of the Haw Patch, open land among the hawthorns so rich and easy to plow that the settlers named the township for the Garden of Eden. Amish families have farmed it since the 1840s, and part of Topeka lies in its south-east corner.
Eden covers surveyed Township 36 North, Range 8 East, with Elkhart County to the west, Newbury to the north and Clearspring to the east. The Haw Patch, named for the hawthorns that grew everywhere among scattered oak and hickory, covered much of the south half and ran into Clearspring and Noble County. Ford (1920) says the soil was found ‘the richest, most easily cultivated soil within the county—no wonder then, that it was named Eden.’ The north half was one great marsh, the source of the two forks of the Little Elkhart River, later drained by state, county and private ditches.
R. H. Rerick, who wrote the 1882 chapter, gave the first place to the Lattas. Robert Latta of Urbana, Ohio, heard of the Haw Patch from surveyors while visiting his son Dr. Johnston Latta at Goshen, and came with his wife and daughter in the early spring of 1832, building a cabin in section 26. William McConnell of Ohio settled in section 35 that fall with his sons and daughter. The two families were rivals: one was a Whig, the other a Democrat, one a Methodist and the other a Presbyterian. William Dempsey came in 1835, Nehemiah Coldron in 1836, and John Thompson in October 1835, later a state senator who rode to Indianapolis on horseback.
Read the full story
Eden was the second township created in the county, on November 5, 1832, cut from Lima, and at first took in all the county south of Township 37 and west of Range 10, including Clearspring and part of what became Noble County. Its first election was held in April 1833 at John Hostettler’s house near the county line. The part south of the Elkhart River was set off as Perry Township on May 7, 1833, and Clearspring in March 1837. By the fall of 1835 there were fifteen householders and seventy-two women and children.
The 1874 atlas says Eden and Newbury were settled by the Amish; the 1893 chronology records an Amish church organized at the Haw Patch in 1854. Benedict Miller built a saw and grist mill near the center of the township in 1854, and John and Amos Schrock a gristmill in section 9 in 1877, sold to Tobias Eash in 1881; the hamlet of Schrock grew there. The Haw Patch had a bad name for horse thieves until the Regulators of 1858, and the Sycamore Literary Society, begun about 1865, brought speakers such as Schuyler Colfax to its hall.
The crossroads called Haw Patch Center, or Slabtown, on the line between Eden and Clearspring became the town of Topeka when the Wabash Railroad came in 1893. Ford counted 1,138 people in 1890 and 1,370 in 1910. The 2020 census counted 4,894 people in Eden Township.