The story
Welcome to Milford Township
Milford Township, in the county’s south-east corner, took its name from Colonel Cochran’s sawmill at a ford on Long Lake’s outlet. It is lake and farm country, home of the first company of Regulators in northern Indiana, an Underground Railroad conductor, and the cement-works village of Stroh.
Milford covers surveyed Township 36 North, Range 11 East, with Springfield to the north, Steuben County to the east, Noble County to the south and Johnson to the west. Turkey Creek runs through the east part, and Turkey, Little Turkey, Lake of the Woods, Blackburn, Pretty and Long lakes lie within it; Long Lake, in the center, is about two and a half miles long. The 1874 atlas says that when the citizens met at Colonel William Cochran’s to name the township they named it for his sawmill near the ford on the outlet of Long Lake, and ‘called it Mill-Ford, or Milford.’
The 1874 atlas says Jacob Butts settled in 1833 and built a log house in section 4, with Richard Rice camping a winter in section 3; Ford (1920) puts Butts here ‘about 1834, possibly a year earlier.’ A great rush came in 1836–38, among them the Cochrans, Goodsells, Turners, Hills, Cases and Waterhouses. Colonel Cochran dammed the outlet of Long Lake in the fall of 1836 and built the township’s first sawmill. The first school was built in 1835 or 1836 at Mud Corners, where Orris Danks taught; at Mud Corners F. B. Massey opened a store in 1845, and Wright & Barry made twenty-five tons of pearl ash a year.
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Milford belonged to Greenfield and then, from 1834, to Springfield, until it was organized on September 5, 1837; the first election, at Samuel Avis’s house, chose Charles Turner justice and Colonel Cochran supervisor. Benjamin B. Waterhouse of Milford was, Ford says, a conductor of the Underground Railroad through LaGrange and Steuben counties, carrying freedom seekers in a covered buggy north to Orland on the way to Canada; Ford credits him with helping more than a hundred. On September 12, 1856, under a state law of 1852, the first company of Regulators in the county was organized at the Bullock schoolhouse to break up the gangs of horse thieves and counterfeiters.
South Milford was laid out in section 32 in 1856 by John A. Bartlett and Francis Henry, and when the Wabash Railroad came through in the early 1890s it gave the village a station; Mud Corners faded away. In the north-east corner, William Hayward platted a village on September 1, 1899, renamed Stroh on February 15, 1900, for the Detroit capitalist Emil Stroh, whose company opened a Portland cement works there in 1900 on a spur of the Wabash. By 1915 its three large kilns turned out 2,000 barrels a day, and Stroh had about 350 people in 1910.
Ford counted 1,314 people in 1890 and 1,107 in 1910. The South Milford Odd Fellows hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2025. The 2020 census counted 2,911 people in Milford Township.