The story
Welcome to Granger
Granger began as a lonely depot and post office on Harris Prairie, where the railroad from Mishawaka ran northeast toward Edwardsburg, Michigan. Its name honors the Grange, the farmers’ movement of the 1870s. Platted in 1883 with sixty-seven people in 1900, it is now a large suburban community of more than thirty thousand.
Granger lies on Harris Prairie, which, like Harris Township, was named for Jacob Harris of Ohio. Chapman (1880) says Harris came in 1830 and raised the first wheat cut in the township, harvested in 1831 with the help of his neighbor Jacob Meyer. David and Josephus Baldwin, who said they were already there when Harris came, Samuel Bell, Adam Miller, a Baptist preacher, and Adam Ringle were among the first families on the prairie; the first school, of round logs fourteen by sixteen feet, stood on its north edge, and Robert Kennedy was the first teacher.
South and east of the prairie lay a great marsh. Chapman describes it as “one continuous sheet of water” that lay on the ground until late summer, until the state cut a ditch through it; Notre Dame kept its largest farm there, raising beef and milk for the university. In 1880 the Grand Trunk railroad crossed the township, and Chapman found on it only “a station, where there are a depot and postoffice, called Granger; no business of any kind is done.” A Granger post office has operated since 1875.
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The town itself was laid out by Thomas J. Foster on April 3, 1883, in fractional section 7, Township 38 North, Range 4 East, close to the Michigan line, with an addition that September. Howard (1907) says it commemorated the Grange, “the great farmer’s movement” of the late nineteenth century, and that “a more suitable name than Granger could not have been selected,” for it stood in the heart of rich farming country on both sides of the state line. An extensive grain trade was carried on by rail, but in 1900 the town had only sixty-seven people.
From sixty-seven people in 1900 Granger has grown into a suburban community of tens of thousands on the old prairie farms north of Mishawaka. It is counted by the Census Bureau as a census-designated place spread across Harris Township and part of Clay Township rather than as an incorporated town. Harris Township as a whole, which Howard called “next to the smallest in the county,” had 481 people in 1900. The 2020 census counted 30,337 people in Granger.