The story
Welcome to Johnson Township
Johnson Township, on the county’s south line, holds more water than any other township in the county: Oliver, Adams, Witmer and Atwood lakes and a scatter of smaller ones that feed the Elkhart River. Its history runs from a French trading house at the Tamarack to the mill town of Wolcottville and the railroad stop at Valentine.
Johnson covers surveyed Township 36 North, Range 10 East, with Bloomfield to the north, Milford to the east, Noble County to the south and Clearspring to the west. Its southern half is full of lakes; Ford (1920) gives Oliver Lake more than 600 acres, with Adams second and Witmer and Atwood not much smaller, and the 1874 atlas praised their sandy beaches and deep blue water. These lakes are the head of the north branch of the Elkhart River. A Potawatomi village stood on the west bank of Oliver Lake when the settlers came, and its people traded and visited at the settlers’ cabins.
By 1833, and perhaps 1832, the Fort Wayne trading house of Comparet & Bowrie had sent Frenchmen to open a post at the Tamarack, on the river near the south line, where a tavern of tamarack poles, the ‘Tamarack House,’ was kept by the widow of the trader Runeau. Burris & Durand built a dam and sawmill there in July 1836, and Comparet a three-story gristmill in 1844, later owned by O. P. Grannis. The first land was entered in June 1834 by Nelson Nichols in section 34 and Peter Lampson in section 33, and John Adams settled by the lake that took his name. Levi Wright came that fall and in February 1835 bought land in section 13, at what became Wright’s Corners.
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The township was created on March 6, 1837, from territory attached to Bloomfield, and its first election was held that April at James Campbell’s house, with Hiram Humphreys as inspector. Thomas Oliver, Philo Taylor, George Wolcott, Levi Wildman and others came in the following years. A Methodist society organized at the Tamarack in 1840 built a small frame church in 1852, and the Baptists, organized at Wolcottville in 1837, built a log meeting house a half mile south of the village in 1843. Levi Wright refused to sell lots at his corners, Ford says, or the railroad might have gone there; a hamlet with a post office, Woodruff, grew up nearby anyway.
George Wolcott’s mills, begun in 1837, made Wolcottville on the south line the township’s chief town. The Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad was built north and south across the township, and in 1873 William Painter became postmaster at its station of Valentine, in sections 8 and 9, which grew around a sawmill of about 1870 and was platted in April 1879. The Wabash crossed the south of the township in the early 1890s. Ford counted about 1,320 people in the township in 1920. The lakes have long drawn fishermen and summer visitors; Ford noted that drainage had shrunk many of them. The 2020 census counted 3,546 people in Johnson Township.