The story
Welcome to Perry Township
Perry Township, in the northwest corner of Noble County, holds Perry’s Prairie, where the first large permanent settlement in the county began in 1830. Its town is Ligonier, platted in 1835 and made by the railroad in the 1850s.
Before Noble County was organized, while it was part of LaGrange County, there was a single township here, called Perry; at an election at John Hostetter’s house in April 1833 Jacob Wolf was chosen justice of the peace, the first officer elected within the present county. In 1836 the commissioners named Perry as one of the new county’s civil townships. Settlement began in 1830, when Levi Perry, Isaiah Dungan and Richard Stone located on the prairie named for Perry; in 1831 came Jacob Wolf, Henry Hostetter, Adam Engle, Jacob Shobe, Joseph Smalley and Henry Miller.
The open prairie spared the settlers the work of clearing, and its farmers were soon supplying other parts of the county, whose people called the trip “the pilgrimage to Egypt.” The first post office in the county was on the prairie, and the first county court met at Adam Engle’s house. The state opened the White Pigeon road through the township about 1835. Adam Engle built a corn-cracker at the north end of Indian Lake about 1835, and Seymour Moses a sawmill on the Elkhart River two miles northwest of Ligonier about 1842.
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Rochester was laid out in November 1836 by Simpson Cummins on section 26, township 35, range 8; an iron works started there in 1837, hauling ore from Ore Prairie in York Township, and a foundry followed about 1844. Ligonier was platted in May 1835 by Isaac Cavin, who never lived in it, and grew slowly — two or three families in 1840 — until 1852, when it became certain the Northern Indiana railroad would pass through; within five years its population and business had quadrupled, and Rochester faded away. Cavin also laid out a village called Washington on section 2 in 1837, which never took hold.
Ligonier was incorporated as a town in 1864 and as a city in 1892, and had about 2,300 people in 1920. The railroad, now the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern main line, crosses the township east and west. The 2020 census counted 6,900 people in Perry Township.
