The story
Welcome to South Milford
South Milford was laid out in 1856 by John A. Bartlett and Francis Henry in the south of Milford Township, near the old crossroads hamlet of Mud Corners. A plank-road sawmill, a country doctor of long standing and, from about 1893, a Wabash station kept it alive while Mud Corners vanished from the map.
Rough, billowy ground kept the first settlers moving past Milford Township, and the 1920 history thought Jacob Butts, about 1834, probably its first actual settler; Richard Rice and William Fitch were living there in the spring of 1835, and a rush of settlers followed in 1836–38. In the autumn of 1836 Col. William Cochran dammed the outlet of Long Lake and built the township’s first sawmill, with a “flutter-wheel” and a “sash saw.” That year the settlers also built the first schoolhouse, at what became known as Mud Corners from the very muddy crossing there; its first teacher, Orris Danks, was “a long-limbed, eccentric Yankee” whom the backwoods children regarded as a marvel of learning. About 1854 a second school of cobblestones and mortar went up, the “Mud Schoolhouse,” which the boys soon picked to pieces with their jackknives.
Mud Corners grew into quite a little village. F. B. Masey opened a store about 1845; his successors, Wright & Barry, ran an ashery and made pearl ash by the ton; William Dunn kept the post office, and the road past the corners was known as “Brain street” for the judges and officials who lived on it. A Methodist society was organized there in 1838 by Rev. Thomas Conley. One of its first members, B. B. Waterhouse, was an ardent opponent of slavery who helped fugitives on their way north: one morning in the autumn of 1853 he fed five or six fugitives brought to his house from Noble County and drove them on to Orland, and for this he was tried in the federal court at Indianapolis in 1854 and sentenced to a $50 fine.
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In 1848 the Plank Road Company built a steam sawmill at South Milford, still running in 1882. Wildman & Taylor opened a country store about 1852, the townspeople paid for a frame schoolhouse in 1854, and Dr. John Dancer arrived in August 1855 to become, for many years, the principal physician of the southeast of the county. In 1856 Bartlett and Henry laid out forty-seven lots on section 32, where four or five families already lived; the Bartlett brothers built the first hotel. When a company of volunteers for the 100th Indiana passed through in 1862, the women of the neighborhood spread a picnic dinner for them. By 1882 the village had about two hundred people and a new brick school.
The Wabash Railroad was built through the township about 1893, with a station at South Milford, and Mud Corners ceased to exist. The Odd Fellows organized Lodge No. 619 on March 16, 1886, and by 1919 had 147 members and a two-story hall; A. M. Jacobs organized the Farmers Bank on July 30, 1910, in a brick building owned by the lodge, and in 1919 it held $140,000 in deposits. The Methodist church then had 197 members, and the Christian church had made its building from the old schoolhouse, bought and rebuilt. Milford Township counted 2,911 people in 2020.