The story
Welcome to York Township
York Township, west of Albion, was named for the New York origins of most of its first settlers. Two of Noble County’s early county seats, Augusta and Port Mitchell, stood within it and are gone.
York was named at the first session of the county commissioners in 1836; in 1854 two of its sections, 13 and 24, went to the new Albion Township. It received its name, the 1920 history says, “from the fact that a majority of the earliest settlers were from the State of New York.” The first settler, by Nelson Prentiss’s account, was John Knight, a squatter who located on a burr-oak barren in section 29 in 1829; Joseph Bradford later entered that quarter and Knight moved to Elkhart Township. Washington and James Henshaw and Levi Perry were the other earliest settlers.
About 1833 the Henshaws built a dam across the Elkhart River at Port Mitchell, with a sawmill and a corn-cracker, hiring Indians to help with the buildings. Joseph Bell built a sawmill on Bell’s Run in section 21, and Halsey Lewis ran a small chair factory from its race until the dam was blamed for sickness and the citizens bought and destroyed it. At the first township election, in the autumn of 1838, only sixteen men were present. Iron ore for the Rochester works came from Ore Prairie in the township.
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Augusta was laid out in August 1837 at the corners of sections 14, 15, 22 and 23 and was chosen county seat that year; after the courthouse burned in March 1843 the seat went to Port Mitchell, and by 1850 Augusta was almost deserted. Port Mitchell had been platted in May 1838 by Samuel Hanna and William F. Engle on sections 35 and 36; in 1847 the county seat moved to Albion and Port Mitchell decayed too, though a woolen mill ran there from about 1852 until it burned about 1872. A village called Van Buren on section 20 “expired soon after being christened.” In the great flood of July 1844 Wesley White drowned crossing the river west of Augusta.
York Township voted a tax in 1872 to help build the Baltimore & Ohio, which began running in 1874. The township is farmland and lakes today. The 2020 census counted 1,532 people in it.