The story
Welcome to Jamestown Township
Jamestown Township, on the Michigan line north of Angola, was set off at the Steuben County commissioners’ first session in 1837. Lake James, the county’s largest, reaches into it, and its village, first named Eagleville, was platted in 1853 at Lake George.
Jamestown was set off and organized on the petition of Theron Storrs and others at the first session of the Steuben County commissioners, which met on June 26, 1837; it is congressional township 38 north, range 13 east. It is a little over four miles north to south and nearly six east to west, and when first settled about 2,000 of its acres were under the water of its lakes, chief among them Lake James, Snow Lake and Lake George.
Albert Ansley made the first land entry on May 10, 1835, and Barton Collins, entering land that July, built the first house between Orland and Bean Creek, Ohio, on the Vistula road. On September 8, 1835, Dennis Depue, John D. Depue, John Wilkins and Jared Fox arrived, and six weeks later more of the Depue family followed. In 1836 came Judge Theron Storrs, Valorous Baker, John Brown and others. Orrin Preston once spent five days going to mill at Constantine and Montville, Michigan, and back.
Read the full story
In the winter of 1836–37 John Knott built the first sawmill on the outlet of Lake George and then a flouring mill; he and Mr. Bell laid out a town called Waynesburg south of the present village, soon abandoned. The first Fourth of July celebration was held at Jamestown in 1841, with a dance that evening in the mill, and William Simmons was the first person buried in the Jamestown cemetery, on January 15, 1841. The village was platted in April 1853 in section 15 at the southwest corner of Lake George by Simeon Gilbert and Joseph Hutchinson; first named Eagleville, it soon became Jamestown, though the post office was called Crooked Creek because there was another Jamestown in Indiana.
“Jamestown Township has never had railroad facilities,” the 1920 county history says; it drew its supplies from Angola and Fremont. Its lakes already drew thousands of summer visitors then. The 2020 census counted 3,269 people in the township.