The story
Welcome to Wayne Township
Wayne Township, in northeastern Noble County, is the home of Kendallville, where the township’s first cabin went up in 1832 or 1833. The Fort Wayne road and its plank road ran through it, and the railroad brought Kendallville its growth.
Wayne was one of the townships named at the first session of the county commissioners in 1836. The first log cabin was built on the site of Kendallville in 1832, the 1882 history says, by David Bundle, the first settler; in the fall of 1833 Mrs. Frances Dingman, whose husband had died at Fort Wayne, bought his claim and turned the cabin into an inn. Before 1836 not more than six or eight families lived in the township, among them Daniel and Nicholas Bixler, Thomas Ford, Truman Bearss and Luke Diggins; the organization of the county in 1836 brought a rush of settlers, and in 1844 forty-two men owned land of their own.
John Sawyer of Knox County, Ohio, entered several hundred acres northwest of Kendallville and was the first blacksmith; an Indian graveyard lay on his land. William Selder ran a tannery on section 22 by 1845. The Sawyer sawmill was built on the Elkhart River in the southwestern part about 1840 and ran about twenty years. The first schoolhouse, a round-log building on the Sawyer farm, went up about 1838, with Joseph White as teacher; by 1882 there were fourteen school buildings outside Kendallville. A small Free-Will Baptist society was formed about 1841 in Daniel Bixler’s barn.
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The plank road from Fort Wayne to Kendallville was much traveled, after the Fugitive Slave Law, by freedom seekers bound for Canada, helped on their way by S. Whitford, John Longyear and old Mr. Waterhouse; Longyear once sheltered eight overnight. Luke Diggins kept a tavern on the Fort Wayne road near the Orange Township line from about 1838.
Kendallville grew fast after 1852, when it became certain the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana railroad would pass through; it was incorporated as a town in 1863 and as a city in 1866. The Grand Rapids & Indiana, built with Kendallville’s bonds, was completed in December 1873. The 2020 census counted 10,929 people in Wayne Township.