The story
Welcome to Greene Township
Greene Township stretches southwest of South Bend from Sumption Prairie to the old bed of the Kankakee. It was named for a family who came from Greene County, Ohio, in 1832, and it remains open farm country with old church and cemetery corners.
Greene was formed on January 4, 1836, Howard (1907) says, out of a large tract that then reached south into what is now Marshall County; the new townships of Union and Liberty in 1837 and Centre in 1840 cut it to its present size. Its northwest side followed the winding Kankakee River until the great Miller ditch drained the marsh and dried up the river bed, and on June 20, 1898, the county made the middle of the ditch the boundary instead. Howard notes its many small lakes, Goose, Duck, Wharton and Bolin among them. Chapman (1880) described the marsh land along the river as good then only for pasture, hay and huckleberries.
Sumption Prairie, “one of the richest and most beautiful” in the county, was named for George Sumption, who settled on section 32 in April 1830, the first settler in the township. John Rupel came from Pennsylvania by way of Elkhart County in March 1831, with two yoke of oxen, four cows, a horse and about two dollars, and Chapman tells how his dogs and the wolves chased each other at night. The township was named, Howard says, for the Greene family: John Greene explored the region on horseback in 1830 and 1831 and in 1832 brought his family, with kinfolk and friends from Greene County, Ohio.
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The Methodists formed the first church in 1832 under the Rev. N. B. Griffith and dedicated a building in 1841, replacing it in 1865. The Rev. Alfred Bryant of South Bend organized a Presbyterian church in 1836 and, Chapman says, did much of the carpentry himself on its 1838 building. Baptists organized in 1846 and built in 1855; the German Baptists built the Oak Grove church, and the Adventists, organized about 1868, had one of the finest brick churches in the township. Andrew Bird was the first child born, on June 24, 1832, and Isaac Rudduck the first to die and the first buried in the Sumption Prairie graveyard, in January 1833. John Green Jr. built the first sawmill, on Potato Creek.
Greene has always been, as Howard put it, “purely an agricultural one,” with 772 people in 1900. In 1930 its eight one-room schools were combined into the Greene Township School, which taught all twelve grades and later became the Greene Intermediate Center until it closed in 2018. The 2020 census counted 2,909 people in the township.