The story
Welcome to Centre Township
Centre Township, just south of South Bend, is the smallest township in the county, twenty square miles crossed by the old Michigan Road. Its first settler bought his land from the Potawatomi in 1829, and its people were so law-abiding, Chapman wrote in 1880, that they had not needed a justice of the peace for twenty years.
Centre was formed by the county board on May 6, 1840, and Howard (1907) says it is one of only two townships whose limits have never changed. It is four miles wide and five long, the smallest in the county. The Michigan Road runs north and south through the middle, angling to the northeast, and the old northern boundary line of the Indiana Territory crosses its north half, so that the lines of the public survey are irregular. The soil is mostly a strong clay, with low ground in the northwest around Rupel Lake, drained by Wenger’s Creek toward the south bend of the St. Joseph.
Chapman (1880) says Nathan Rose was the first to contract for land: he came in the summer of 1829, bought his land from the Potawatomi on section 36, and went back to work in a sawmill on the Tippecanoe River near Rochester to pay for it, moving his family here in the fall of 1830. James and Ashur Palmer settled in 1830 on the little prairie that still bears their name, and Andrew Milling came about the same time. Henry Stull, a Virginian, bought land in the north part in September 1830, when the land office was at Fort Wayne and there were no wagon roads north of Logansport; his motto, Chapman says, was “Pay as you go.” Peter Rupel’s family moved in from Elkhart in 1831.
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After 1831 settlers came fast: the Smiths, Isaac Lamb, Abiel Hungerford and the surveyor Tyra W. Bray, the Inwoods in 1835, and later the Odells, Ulerys and Rushes. Elizabeth Rose was the first child born in the township, and Mathias Stover the first justice of the peace. The first schoolhouse, of round logs with a puncheon floor and a stick-and-mud chimney, was built in 1835 on Nathan Rose’s farm beside the Michigan Road, with Mary Milling as the first teacher. The German Baptists built the Palmer Prairie church on section 2 in 1859, and the county kept its first poor farm in Centre from 1846 to 1855.
The Vandalia railroad ran north and south through the township, with a small station called Nutwood, which had a post office and forty-three people in 1900; otherwise, Howard wrote, Centre was “purely agricultural,” with 608 people. South Bend’s city limits now reach into the township. The 2020 census counted 14,368 people in Centre Township.