The story
Welcome to Pleasant Lake
Pleasant Lake stands between Long Lake and Pleasant Lake, a short way from the vanished Steubenville that tried in 1837 to be the county seat. The railroad of 1870 made it a station and a summer resort, and its county fair drew thousands in the 1870s.
Steuben Township was first settled in 1835 by Seth W. Murray, Isaac Glover, Alexander C. Britton, Reuben Warwick, James Forbes and Daniel Cummings; the first log house went up that year on section 15, where the village now stands. Abner Winsor and Murray planted the first orchards in the spring of 1836, and the township’s first school was built that year in the village of Steubenville, with Lucy Avery as teacher. Steubenville, platted in November 1835 not far from the present village, competed with Angola for the county seat early in 1837, and when Angola won it began to decline.
The Steubenville post office, opened under Seth W. Murray in May 1839, was renamed Pleasant Lake in 1846. A plat of the village was made by Payne C. Parker in February 1846, but the 1920 history says its lots seem never to have been sold by it. William Thompson and others laid out the present village in 1870 on section 15, between Long and Pleasant lakes, and David S. Gilbert added to it. The same year the Fort Wayne & Jackson line of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern came through, and Hiram Croxton, who built the depot, served eight years as the first station agent.
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In 1875 the people of Steuben, Salem, Otsego and Richland townships organized the Pleasant Lake Agricultural Society, and two thousand people came to its second fair in Simmons’s Park in September 1876. By 1885 the lake had become “a favorite resort of excursionists,” and there was talk of dredging the channels to Golden, Hogback and Silver lakes so that steamers could pass among them. The village then had Baptist, Methodist, Congregational and Universalist societies, a Grand Army post mustered in 1883, two dry-goods stores, a flouring mill and the Lake View House.
In 1919 Pleasant Lake had a new township high school, built in 1914 for about $30,000, a department store, garages, lumber yards and a grain elevator, and ice was cut on the lakes and shipped by a Fort Wayne firm. Cottages lined the shores of Long and Pleasant lakes. The 1882 depot of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern still stands and was listed on the National Register in 2001. Steuben Township counted 2,844 people in 2020.