The story
Welcome to Springfield Township
Springfield Township, on the county’s east line, grew around the water power at Mongo, where the Pigeon River and Turkey Creek meet. Its old store of 1832 still stands, a Fourierist community tried shared living here in the 1840s, and much of its river valley is now the Pigeon River Fish and Wildlife Area.
Springfield covers surveyed Township 37 North, Range 11 East, with Greenfield to the north, Steuben County to the east, Milford to the south and Bloomfield to the west. Grass Lake and Appleman Lake, Turkey Creek and the Pigeon River make up most of its water, and Brushy Prairie lies in the south. Before 1832, the 1874 atlas says, the Potawatomi were its only occupants except a few squatters. The water power where the river and creek join was called Union Mills, for the union of the streams, and the village there took the Potawatomi name Mongoquinong, shortened to Mongo in 1874.
The first settler was John B. Clark, a squatter who came in the fall of 1830 to the west bank of Turkey Creek near the center of the township. French traders from Fort Wayne kept a post at Mongoquinong until the fall of 1832. L. K. Brownell, who claimed the water power about 1830, built a dam and a gristmill there, finished in January 1832, then a distillery, and John O’Ferrell opened a small store and kept the post office. During the Black Hawk War scare of 1832 a few men staged a hoax massacre, the ‘Gage and Langdon War,’ that sent over a hundred settlers to arms and nearly led them to fire on a friendly Potawatomi camp; the jokers had to sell out and leave.
Read the full story
The land was surveyed in 1832 and sold that fall. In the spring of 1833, the 1874 atlas says, John B. Clark, Jesse Huntsman, Joseph and Benjamin Foos, William Seaburn and William S. Prentiss met in an abandoned cabin, agreed to call the township Springfield, and petitioned the commissioners, who organized it on May 4, 1834; the first election was held at Benjamin Jones’s house that August. Drusus Nichols bought the Mongo mills, platted the village in March 1840, and shipped a thousand barrels of flour a year to Fort Wayne and Adrian in 1844–46. Leonard Appleman platted Springfield village, later called Applemanburg, in 1842, and Brushy Chapel, the first Methodist church, was built that year.
In 1843 Benjamin Jones, Jesse Huntsman, Judge William S. Prentiss and others formed the LaGrange Phalanx on the plan of Charles Fourier and rented buildings on Jones’s farm; about thirty families lived by rules made in councils of industry, commerce, justice and education, and kept a good school for their children, until the society was amicably dissolved. In 1858 freethinkers built a Free Hall in section 18 for lectures on religion, politics and science. A mastodon tooth was dug up on the Prentiss farm in the valley of Turkey Creek.
The St. Joseph Valley Railroad reached Mongo early in the 1900s, and the village had about 225 people in 1920. The Pigeon River Fish and Wildlife Area, established in 1956 when the Mongo, Nasby and Ontario reservoirs were given to the state, now spreads along the valley. The 2020 census counted 1,158 people in Springfield Township.