The story
Welcome to Crumstown
Crumstown began as Crum’s Point, the tip of a ridge of dry ground running out into the old Kankakee marsh southwest of South Bend. Christian Holler platted a town there on the Grand Trunk in 1875 and named it for the Crums, and in 1906 a boy found the bones of a mastodon on a ditch bank nearby.
The place took its first name from a family and a piece of ground. Crum’s Point was a spur of high land at the edge of the Kankakee marsh, named for the family of Stephen and Mahala Crum, who were living in Bertrand Township, Michigan, in 1840 and in Warren Township by 1850. A county map of 1863 shows “Crum & Hollar” holding land together along the river. Chapman (1880) lists a William Crumb among Warren Township’s early settlers, and mentions a sawmill run by Isaac R. Cole at Crum’s Point.
On April 21, 1875, Christian Holler laid out the original plat of the town of Crum’s Point on the line of the Grand Trunk railroad, on the southwest quarter of the southwest quarter of section 27, Township 37 North, Range 1 East, not far from where Grapevine Creek met the Kankakee. Matthias Stover had surveyed it the previous September, and Holler platted an addition on January 20, 1882. The 1875 county atlas shows seventeen lots beside the depot grounds, on Main, Holler and North streets. The post office was Crum’s Point from 1875, Crumtown from 1888 and Crumstown from 1893 until it closed in 1918, while the railroad kept the name Crum’s Point until 1903.
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Howard (1907) wrote that with the drainage of the upper Kankakee valley Crum’s Point, “or Crum’s Town, as it is frequently called,” had become the center of a rich farming district, on one of the main gravel roads leading southwest from South Bend. It had about a hundred people in 1900. Polish farm families settled around it at the turn of the century, a Mennonite church was founded there by a minister named Yoder, and the village kept a school, a ball team and a union church.
About 1903 a steam dredge working on a drainage ditch three miles southwest of the village turned up the bones of a mastodon. In April 1906 Charles Custer, a sixteen-year-old grandson of Stephen Crum, found them lying on the ditch bank; Father Alexander Buechler of Terre Coupee began collecting them, and Notre Dame took the bones, though no record has been found that they were ever mounted. The road out of South Bend to the village is still the Crumstown Highway, and Chamberlain Lake, which Howard called Fish or Chamberlain Lake, is a county nature preserve on it. Crumstown is not counted separately by the census.