The story
Welcome to German Township
German Township lies west of the St. Joseph River between South Bend and the Michigan line, on the horseshoe of rich Portage Prairie. The famous portage to the Kankakee crossed it, the county’s first seat of justice was laid out here in 1830, and three hopeful towns came and went without leaving a trace.
Howard (1907) calls this locality “undoubtedly the most famous in our early history.” Over the portage between the St. Joseph and the Kankakee, he writes, passed Marquette, La Salle and Charlevoix; near the spot later called Mount Pleasant stood a great Miami village. The name is older than the present township. When the board of justices divided the county on November 25, 1830, it named a much larger German Township, said to be for the German settlers then living in it, and ordered its voters to meet at David Miller’s house, where they elected Lambert McCombs justice of the peace on December 18. The present township was formed on January 6, 1834, and reached its final shape, the fractional Township 38 North, Range 2 East west of the river, in 1840.
Chapman (1880) names Lambert McCombs, John Hague and the surveyor William Brookfield as the first permanent settlers, about 1829 or 1830; in 1830 came John Smith and David Miller, Christian Holler, and the Hardmans, and in 1831 John Cissne, who had passed through in 1810 from Detroit and vowed to return. Henry Smith, born September 15, 1829, was probably the first white child born in the county, Holler built the first frame house, on section 7, and Hague was said to have plowed the first furrow. In the winter of 1832 a small boy, Jacob M. Whitmer, was lost for three days and two nights until Judge McCartney found him on horseback.
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Three towns were laid out here and vanished. Brookfield platted St. Joseph by the river in September 1830 as the first county seat, but not one house was built before the seat moved to South Bend in 1831. The town of Portage, laid out on July 12, 1834, near the river, had a ferry, two stores and a tavern for a while. Mount Pleasant, laid out on the Michigan Road on August 19, 1836, had the township’s only post office, with Levi Wills as postmaster, two hotels and two blacksmiths, and was soon vacated. Chapman wrote that “to-day nothing remains to mark the former existence of any of these towns.”
The German Baptists, organized by Elder David Miller about 1831, built their brick church on section 18 in 1851; the Methodists built a church about 1854 that passed to the Baptists, and a Universalist congregation was organized in 1858. Howard called German purely agricultural and “said to be the wealthiest township per capita in Indiana,” with 536 people in 1900. Today South Bend International Airport lies mostly within the township, and the city reaches into its south side. The 2020 census counted 10,001 people.