The story
Welcome to Elkhart Township
Elkhart Township, in northern Noble County, was settled about 1832 along the Elkhart River. Two villages laid out in its early years faded, and its village today, Wawaka, grew up on the railroad in 1857.
Elkhart Township was one of the civil townships the Noble County commissioners named at their first session in 1836, each matching a congressional township six miles square. Samuel Tibbot built a cabin there in 1832, and the Knights, a Mr. Austin and David P. Bourie came about the same time.
Bourie, a bachelor, built a log storeroom near the Elkhart River in the southwestern part and stocked it with about $1,000 of goods; within three years his stock was worth $4,000, much of his trade being with the Indians. The county history tells how, suspecting two strangers of going to claim his land, he dressed as an Indian, rode to the Fort Wayne land office on a fast pony and entered it ahead of them.
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In June 1837 John and William Knight laid out a village called Pittsburg in section 30, but the lots did not sell and only one building was begun. Springfield, in section 22, did better for a time: Joseph Steinberger built a sawmill there in 1838, and by 1845 it had fifteen or more families, two stores, a gristmill, a sawmill, a church and a schoolhouse, before a long decline left it, in a former historian’s words, “but the ghost of its former fame.”
The railroad made Wawaka. Isaac Tibbot had built the first house on the site in 1834, and in February 1857, as the line came through, he laid out eighty lots on both sides of the track. Ellis & Mummert built a three-story gristmill there about 1867 that made up to 100 barrels of flour a day, much of it shipped east, until it burned in 1874; in 1880 the village shipped 50,000 bushels of wheat. Wawaka had about 400 people in 1920. The 2020 census counted 2,062 people in the township.