The story
Welcome to Jackson Township
Jackson Township, on Steuben County’s western line, is the oldest settled part of the county: Gideon Langdon and John and Jacob Stayner came to Jackson Prairie in 1831. John Stayner named it for Andrew Jackson, and the hamlet of Flint grew up at the county’s first mill.
Jackson Township is congressional township 37 north, range 12 east, about 23,000 acres, with Lake Gage on its northern border and Pigeon Creek winding west and north through it. It was already a township when the Steuben County commissioners first met on June 26, 1837, and ordered an election of two justices of the peace for it. John Stayner, a veteran of the War of 1812 and an admirer of Andrew Jackson, suggested the name.
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; the county histories count all three as first settlers. Langdon made the first land entry in the county on September 17, 1831. Zephaniah Stayner, born April 27, 1832, was the first white child born in the county; Mrs. Langdon died in 1832 and was buried in the cemetery on the prairie; and James Huntsman and Hannah Davis, married in 1832, were the county’s first couple. Hannah Davis was also the first teacher, in a schoolhouse of tamarack poles on the north side of the prairie that cost $50. Jacob S. Van Epps kept the first store on Beaver Dam run in 1833, and the first election was held in John Stayner’s dooryard.
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Edward Griswold built a sawmill in 1834 at what became Flint, the first mill of any kind in the county; John Thompson, from Canada in 1838, built a race and a gristmill there. It burned in December 1858 and was rebuilt in 1861 by Wallace and Philo Clark, and in 1919 Allison S. Smith ran it, grinding buckwheat sought “far and near.” Flint was platted in December 1887 in section 22.
None of the county’s railroads crossed Jackson Township; in 1919 Flint had a store, a mill, Methodist and Christian churches and two rural mail routes out of Angola. The 2020 census counted 1,633 people in the township.