The story
Welcome to Liberty Township
Liberty Township, in the southwest of the county, was once so thickly wooded that settlers walked to Elkhart to have their grain ground. Pennsylvania German farmers and sawmill men cleared it, and today its best-known ground is Potato Creek State Park and Worster Lake.
The county board formed Liberty on May 2, 1837, Howard (1907) says, and it included what is now Lincoln Township until June 7, 1866, when the settlers around Walkerton, finding it hard to reach the elections, asked to be set off. Chapman (1880) says the township was organized in May 1837 by Daniel and James Antrim, John and David Rupel, Samuel Loring, James Cole, Jacob Rupel and Joseph Liggett, and that the first election was held that spring at James P. Antrim’s house in North Liberty, where Antrim was chosen justice of the peace.
The first settlers came in 1833 near the site of North Liberty: Jacob and John Earhart, John Kane and Isaac Townsend. Few followed until 1836. Chapman describes their hardships: grain carried to Elkhart to be ground, a wait of nearly a week for a turn at the mill, and men working all week far from home who might have to throw their week’s beef to the wolves on the walk back along the Indian trail. Bands of Potawatomi still hunted deer in the woods; Chapman tells of a dozen men who came into Mrs. Waldsmith’s house one winter day while her husband was away, and left after she fed them.
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A gristmill was built at North Liberty in 1837, and Hiram Bean and Alonzo Hill built a sawmill in 1839. The land was “very thickly and heavily timbered,” and serious clearing began only about 1850; by 1880 five sawmills were running, and farming, lumbering and stock raising were the township’s business. Most of its people, Chapman and Howard agree, were of Pennsylvania German stock. The Methodists built the first church in North Liberty in 1851; the German Baptists, among the largest congregations, had two country churches, and Evangelical, Lutheran and United Brethren churches stood in the township as well. The first log schoolhouse was built in 1838, half a mile south of the village.
The low lands along the Kankakee were reclaimed by drainage. Potato Creek, a mill stream in the nineteenth century, was dammed to make Worster Lake, which filled after 1974, the heart of Potato Creek State Park; in the park is the Porter Rea Cemetery, deeded in 1854, where Black and white neighbors of the nearby Huggart Settlement were buried. In 1900 the township had 1,843 people, 504 of them in North Liberty. The 2020 census counted 3,416.