The story
Welcome to Steuben Township
Steuben Township, on the DeKalb County line south of Angola, was settled in 1835. Its first village, Steubenville, bid for the county seat and lost; Pleasant Lake grew on the railroad, and Ashley was platted by the Wabash in 1892.
Steuben Township is congressional township 36 north, range 13 east, about 23,000 acres drained by Pigeon Creek, with Golden, Goose Neck, Long and Pleasant lakes. It was voting by 1840, when it gave William H. Harrison an eight-vote plurality. Seth W. Murray, Isaac Glover, Alexander Britton, Reuben Warwick, James Forbes and Daniel Cummings were its pioneers in 1835, followed in 1836 by Abner Winsor and the Carter family.
The first log house was built on section 15 in 1835, and Seth W. Murray built the first dwelling house. The first schoolhouse went up in 1836 on section 10 in the village of Steubenville, near the present Pleasant Lake, which was supposed to have been platted in November 1835 as a rival of Angola. Isaac Glover, Abner Winsor and others offered $16,200 if the county seat were placed at Steubenville, but the offer of Thomas Gale and Cornelius Gilmore at Angola was accepted.
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Pleasant Lake, on section 15 between Long and Pleasant lakes, was laid out in February 1846 by Payne C. Parker. The Fort Wayne, Jackson & Saginaw Railroad came through from the south in 1870 with a station there, and a second Steubenville was platted in 1873 where the Wabash later crossed it. When the Wabash was built in 1892, the Indiana Improvement Company platted Ashley, on July 18, 1892, in the southwest corner of the township, after Hudson declined to give the aid asked; the railroad’s division shops at Ashley were moved to Ohio in 1907.
In 1919 Pleasant Lake had a township high school built in 1914 and summer cottages along its lakes, and Ashley about 1,000 people. The 2020 census counted 2,844 people in Steuben Township.