The story
Welcome to Flint
Flint grew up around the mill seat on Pigeon Creek where Edward Griswold built the first sawmill in Steuben County in 1834. A gristmill followed, and in 1919 the mill was still grinding buckwheat that, the county history said, was sought after far and near.
Jackson Township has the honor, the 1885 history says, of being the oldest settled part of Steuben County: Gideon Langdon located on section 5 in the spring of 1831, and on May 16 that year John and Jacob Stayner arrived from Ohio with their families, twelve people in all. Pigeon Creek flows west and north through the township and spreads into a pond a mile long east of Flint.
In 1834 Edward Griswold built a sawmill at what became Flint, the first in the county. He ran it about four years, sold to Dr. Alonzo Clark and moved to Iowa; Clark sold after two years to John Thompson, who came from Canada in 1838, built the race and replaced the sawmill with a gristmill. Spencer I. Cleveland owned it when it burned in December 1858, at a loss of at least $6,000. Wallace and Philo Clark rebuilt it in 1861, and after a string of owners Wallace Clark held it alone from 1878.
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The township’s post office began in 1839 as Jackson Prairie, with Adolphus Town as postmaster, and the 1885 history’s list of postmasters shows it renamed Flint. In 1885 the hamlet had two general merchants, a merchant who was also postmaster, a blacksmith, the gristmill and two physicians, and it had become the home of Corinthian Lodge No. 285 of the Masons. That lodge had been chartered at Salem Center in 1863 and when the lodge burned on October 13, 1871, its charter was destroyed and a new one issued; it was later moved to Flint, the 1885 history says, to suit the majority of its members.
Flint was platted in December 1887 on section 22 by Elisha Merritt. The 1920 history called it the only hamlet in Jackson Township. Its mill had passed through Lewis Corwin to Allison S. Smith in 1902, who ground meal and feed but no wheat flour, and buckwheat in its season. Drainage ditches had by then destroyed the water power and the mill ran by steam. In 1919 Flint had Arnold Brothers’ general store, a blacksmith, a bakery, barber shop and pool hall run by Denman & Son, a steam sawmill, a small tobacco and candy store, Methodist and Christian churches, Odd Fellows and Masonic lodges, and two rural mail routes out of Angola. Jackson Township counted 1,633 people in 2020.