The story
Welcome to Pleasant Township
Pleasant Township is the central township of Steuben County and holds Angola, the county seat. John Stealy, a Free-Will Baptist minister, made the first land entry in 1835, and Thomas Gale and Cornelius Gilmore entered the site of Angola the next spring.
Pleasant comprises all of congressional township 37 north, range 13 east, about 22,000 acres, of which some 3,000 were first under the water of its lakes: Lake James in the north, the largest in the county, Crooked Lake, Fox Lake near Angola, and others. “Its name was appropriately selected,” the 1920 history says. The township was voting by 1840, when 83 votes were cast.
John Stealy entered the southwest quarter of section 34 in August 1835 and arrived with his family from Marion County, Ohio, on February 17, 1836; Samuel Pierson’s family came from Ypsilanti, Michigan, in May. In April 1836 Thomas Gale and Cornelius Gilmore entered the land where Angola stands, and in August Daniel and David Phenicie settled three miles northeast of it and opened a road from near Fremont, meeting Gilmore and John Whelan, who had cut through from the other side; Daniel Phenicie then drove the first team into Angola. The first religious services were held at Elder Stealy’s house in 1837, the first school was kept there in 1838 by Hortense Miner, and Lydia Stealy, born April 5, 1836, was the first child born in the township.
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Gale and Gilmore laid out the original plat of Angola, and through Gale’s efforts the county seat was located there soon after the county was organized in 1837; they gave the courthouse site and finished a frame courthouse in 1841. Angola lies in the southeastern part of the township.
The Fort Wayne, Jackson & Saginaw Railroad, built through the county in 1870 and later part of the Lake Shore and the New York Central, has its one Pleasant Township station at Angola. In 1907 the short-lived St. Joseph Valley road also crossed the township. The census counted 3,517 people in 1910, and the 2020 census counted 14,424.