The story
Welcome to Van Buren Township
Van Buren Township, in the county’s north-west corner, was named in January 1837 for the newly elected president. The Pigeon River runs through its center, past the old mill village of Van Buren, whose post office was Scott, and its western half is full of small lakes.
Van Buren covers the northernmost part of Ranges 8 and 9 East, Township 38 North, between Michigan on the north, Lima on the east, Clay and Newbury on the south and Elkhart County on the west. Ford (1920) describes level farmland in the east and, in the west, ‘a beautiful country, full of small lakes,’ among them East, Stone and Fish lakes. The Pigeon River crosses the center; it gave such a flow that there was once talk of making it navigable. As late as 1880 an eighth of the township was marsh, and the Big Marsh held deposits of bog iron.
The county commissioners set off the township in January 1837 (January 3 in Ford’s list) and named it for Martin Van Buren, then president-elect, ordering an election for the first Monday in April at Seldon Martin’s house; some thirty men voted. The first settlers came from Washington County, Ohio, to what was called the Crooked Creek Settlement: Nathaniel Callahan, Obadiah and Ami Lawrence, Asa and John Olney and others, with Jesse Huntsman on the only piece of prairie and Nehemiah Coldren, who built a house near the later Crooked Creek bridge. When the land came on the market in June 1831, Lawrence, Callahan and Olney walked to the Fort Wayne land office on the old Indian trail.
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The 1874 atlas records the first birth on February 20, 1832, and the first sermon, by the Rev. Christopher Cory at Callahan’s in July 1832; Clarissa Munger taught the first school at Callahan’s in 1836. The Martin brothers built a sawmill on the Pigeon in the summer of 1834 and a flour mill the next year, at the village of Van Buren in section 13, whose post office, Scott, opened in 1836. The mills grew until they made 15,000 barrels of flour and 350,000 feet of lumber a year, and the Martins ran a distillery from 1836 to 1840. Settlement of the west part began about 1837 with Jacob Moak, the Marshalls of England and the Quaker William Davis; the first burying ground was on the Mack place. Marion, laid out on the Vistula Road in 1836, soon vanished into the fields.
Wheat hauled to Constantine, Michigan, brought only 35 cents a bushel in 1834, and smutty grain had to be washed on a floor before it went to market. Amish families spread north from Newbury, and by 1881 one of the three old-order districts took in part of Van Buren. On May 14, 1883, the only tornado in the county’s recorded history crossed the township, destroying buildings and killing William Moak. The Goshen–Sturgis railroad of 1888 gave the township a station at Seybert, in section 32.
When the timber was gone and the great milling centers took the trade, the village of Van Buren faded; in 1881 it still had two stores, and by 1920 Ford wrote that no village existed there. The 2020 census counted 4,208 people in Van Buren Township.