The story
Welcome to Orange Township
Orange Township, in northeastern Noble County, was changed by the state canal works of the 1830s: the Northport feeder dam made the reservoir now called Sylvan Lake, and Rome City grew beside it. Brimfield is its railroad village.
Orange was among the townships named at the first session of the county commissioners in 1836. The 1920 history places the first permanent settler about 1833 or 1834. Early landholders included Eri Allen, William Wright, David B. Herriman, David Law, Luke Diggins, Timothy Gaby, William Latta, David P. Bowrie and Francis Comparet, and by 1844 about 150 people owned land. There were Potawatomi villages near the Narrows of Sylvan Lake and in the west near Waldron Lake, and the village of Pa-hed-ketch-a stood in section 14.
The state’s canal plan called for a navigable feeder from Northport with a dam and reservoir. The dam broke in 1839, in 1844, when three people drowned, and again in 1855; when the canal was given up the state gave the water power to the county for the common schools. The reservoir, the 1920 history says, is the artificial body of water now called Sylvan Lake. William Latta built the first sawmill near the head of the lake about 1836, which cut lumber for the dam.
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Francis Comparet, a French trader, laid out Northport on section 9 in December 1838, but it never held more than a dozen families; the site later became the Catholic sanitarium of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood. Rome was laid out in June 1839 on the school section, 16; the name, the 1920 history says, came from the canal fill, where the Irish crew on the south side were told to “do as did the Romans,” and the post office became Rome City. For nearly thirty years the Island Park Assembly, on the Chautauqua plan, drew thousands to the lake each season.
The Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana built a station at the site of Brimfield, and William Bliss laid out the village in March 1861; it was long called Rome Station, as it served the Rome City factories until the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad was built through the county in 1873. Brimfield had about 300 people in 1920. The 2020 census counted 3,934 people in the township.