The story
Welcome to Harris Township
Harris Township fills the northeast corner of the county against Michigan and Elkhart County. It took its name from Jacob Harris, who raised the first wheat on Harris Prairie in 1831, and its once-flooded marsh became farmland and then the suburbs of Granger.
The county board first tried to set off a township here called Washington on May 4, 1835, but the order was never carried out and was struck from the record, Howard (1907) says, probably because most of the people did not want it. On January 5, 1836, the board formed Harris Township in the same corner, a little smaller; in 1840 and 1842 strips were taken off its west side for Clay, leaving it next to the smallest township in the county. Its boundaries run from the Michigan line south through Township 38 North, Range 3 East, to the Elkhart County line.
The prairie and the township were named for Jacob Harris of Ohio, who came in 1830 and, Chapman (1880) says, raised the first wheat cut in the township in 1831, with his neighbor Jacob Meyer helping to harvest it. His son-in-law Samuel Bell came with him. David and Josephus Baldwin claimed to have come in 1828 or 1829, before Harris. Adam Miller, a Baptist preacher, Adam Ringle, Joseph Buell, Henry Augustine, Robert Kennedy, the Ringles and Arbogast Zaehnle, who came from Germany by way of Ohio in 1834, were other early settlers. An old Indian trail from Chicago to Detroit crossed the southeast corner.
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Much of the middle and southeast of the township was marsh, which Chapman describes as “one continuous sheet of water” that lay until late summer, so boggy in places no man or beast could cross it. A sluggish stream, later called Sheffield Creek, led from it to the St. Joseph, and the state turned it into a great ditch; Notre Dame kept its largest farm on the reclaimed land, raising beef and milk for the university. Howard wrote that the lowlands had become nearly as valuable as the uplands of Harris Prairie.
The first school was a log house fourteen by sixteen feet on the north edge of the prairie, where Robert Kennedy taught; Howard calls him “one of the good and strong men” of the county, who later moved to St. Edward, Nebraska. Presbyterian, Evangelical and Christian churches were organized; the Christian church began on January 7, 1863, with thirty-one members. The Grand Trunk railroad brought the station of Granger, and in 1900 the whole township had 481 people. Granger and part of Mishawaka now lie within it, and the 2020 census counted 24,397 people.