The story
Welcome to Noble Township
Noble Township holds the first white settlement in Noble County, Joel Bristol’s cabin of April 1827. Wolf Lake, laid out in 1836 on the Fort Wayne and Goshen road, became its village.
Noble Township was named at the first session of the county commissioners in 1836. The first settlement in Noble County was made in it: Joel Bristol arrived on April 4, 1827, with his wife, his in-laws Samuel, Isaac and William Tibbot, and three sisters, eight people in all, at a point southeast of Wolf Lake. Their nearest neighbor was on Blue River six miles toward Fort Wayne, and the nearest post office was at Fort Wayne until about 1831.
By the time the county was organized many others had come, among them John G. Hall, John Skinner, the Busz, Sandford, Winebrenner and Scarlett families, Patrick C. Miller and Thomas Shepard; the thickest settlement was around Wolf Lake, and seventy-nine people owned land in the township in 1841. About 1832 John G. Hall, who had carried the mail from Fort Wayne to Goshen on the back of an ox, built a gristmill on the Elkhart River where the Goshen road crossed it, with a toll bridge just below his dam. Mr. Elliott built a sawmill about 1835 on a branch of the river in the northeast, and Samuel L. Smith a frame sawmill on Hall’s old site soon after 1840.
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The village of Wolf Lake was laid out in April 1836 for Patrick C. Miller and Andrew Stewart, seventy-one lots on the northwest quarter of section 9; it had a post office from about 1837, with Miller as postmaster, and about 220 people in 1920. In November 1849 Joel Bristol laid out Nobleville on section 25, but it never drew settlers and died out. A later hamlet, Merriam, also in section 25, had two stores, two blacksmith shops and a Christian church in 1920 and lay on the proposed Lincoln Highway.
No railroad crossed the township; in 1920 Wolf Lake’s nearest shipping point was Kimmell, six miles off, and its nearest bank was at Albion, seven miles away. The township remains farm and lake country. The 2020 census counted 3,011 people in Noble Township.