The story
Welcome to Hudson
Hudson began as a sawmill, a store and a gristmill in the 1860s, was platted as North Benton in 1869, and boomed in 1873 on the promise of a railroad that was never built. When the Wabash finally came, it platted its own town of Ashley a mile east, and the two have lived side by side ever since.
Salem Township’s first land was entered by Caleb Hopkins on August 26, 1835, and Richard Knott became its first permanent settler a few months later. Hudson grew up in the southeast corner, on the line between Salem and Steuben townships. Joseph and John Miller built a sawmill there, and about 1865 Michael Miller opened a small store near it, which passed to Ira Allerton and in 1867 to Keller & Son. In December 1866 Alexander Fullerton brought the whole machinery of a gristmill, engines, boiler and burrs, from Fostoria, Ohio, and started grinding; in 1884 its owners, Ferguson & Fullerton, replaced the burrs with three sets of Nordyke & Marmon rollers.
Elizabeth Clark and others platted the village on section 31 of Steuben Township, the 1920 county history gives the date as August 14, 1869, and it was recorded as North Benton, which the 1885 history called “still the proper name for the town, though it is generally known as Hudson, the name of the postoffice.” A North Benton post office under Ira Allerton lasted from December 1868 to November 1869, and the Hudson office opened on January 15, 1875, with David Ferrier as postmaster.
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The business center grew on Brugh’s addition. In the spring of 1873, while work was under way on the proposed Chicago & Canada (Canada Southern) railroad, Leander Brugh had twenty-two acres of his farm on section 36 of Salem Township surveyed into lots, which were at once in great demand. Allerton opened the first store on it in the fall of 1873, J. S. Moore of Auburn built a hotel finished in 1874, and a Methodist Episcopal church, 34 by 56 feet, went up the same year for a class first formed in 1854. The railroad was never finished, but the 1885 history found Hudson, with about four hundred people, “doing a thriving business.” A fire in December 1884 burned a drug store, a doctor’s home and office and two store buildings.
When the Wabash Railroad came through about 1892–93, it asked Hudson for aid toward building the road. The town gave none, the railroad platted Ashley a mile to the east, and its shops and division went there. Hudson was incorporated in 1892 or 1893. The station for both towns was named “Hudson-Ashley,” though the depot stood nearer to Hudson’s business center.
In 1911 local men built a large warehouse on the tracks for storing the onions of the surrounding muck farms, and in 1915 the town put up a stucco town building for $3,500. The Farmers State Bank was organized on April 28, 1917. The 2020 census counted 585 people in Hudson.