The story
Welcome to Mongo
Mongo began in 1831 when L. K. Brownell dammed the Pigeon River and built a gristmill and distillery near a Potawatomi encampment, with French traders from Fort Wayne close by. Drusus Nichols platted it as Mongoquinong in 1840; the long name was later cut to Mongo.
In the spring of 1831 L. K. Brownell, a settler with money at his command, located a claim on the Pigeon River, built a dam across it and put up a two-story gristmill with two sets of burrs, one for wheat and one for corn. The spot had long been a seasonal camp of the Potawatomi, and French traders from Fort Wayne set up beside the mill; one, whom the 1882 history spells Druryeaur, kept a small trading house across the river. Brownell added a distillery making thirty to forty gallons of whisky a day, and John O’Ferrell, an Irishman, opened a store worth about $400 and kept the post office for a time. Arthur Burrows opened a hotel in 1833. “This,” the 1882 history says, “was the Mongo of 1833.”
The traders, O’Ferrell and Brownell had a hand in a hoax about the time of the Black Hawk War, remembered as the “Gage and Langdon war,” when a false report of a massacre at the mill brought more than a hundred armed men to the spot while about seventy-five Potawatomi camped nearby hung out a white flag. Feeling ran so hard against the jokers afterward that trade at the mill and store fell away, and the Frenchman left in the fall of 1832.
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About 1836 Drusus Nichols bought the mill, the store and the distillery. The settlement was then called Union Mills, and the Mongoquinong post office, which had moved with its postmaster from Lima, came there; Nichols was postmaster for many years. The distillery ran until it burned about 1842, and in 1844, 1845 and 1846 Nichols shipped more than a thousand barrels of flour a year to Fort Wayne and to Adrian, Michigan. In 1840 eight hundred people gathered at Mongoquinong to hear Whig speakers, and Whigs chased Democrats through the houses and gardens to “baptize” them with whisky. In March 1840 Nichols had about 180 lots laid out on sections 5 and 8.
The old mill was used until 1869, when C. L. Hawk built a new one; his name was on its sign when it was photographed for the 1920 county history. The 1882 history believed the village had never held more than 150 people. The St. Joseph Valley Railroad reached Mongo about 1900, the Mongo State Bank was organized on December 8, 1915, and in 1920 the village had about 225 people.
In 1956 the Mongo reservoir, with those at Nasby and Ontario, was given to the state and became the start of the Pigeon River Fish and Wildlife Area, now more than 11,000 acres along the river. The store building known as the Olde Store, or John O’Ferrell Store, was listed on the National Register in 1975. Springfield Township counted 1,158 people in 2020.