The story
Welcome to Lincoln Township
Lincoln Township, in the far southwest corner of the county along the Kankakee, was the last township formed, in 1866, when its settlers petitioned for a township of their own named Lincoln. Its marshes and thickets were settled late, and its life has always centered on the railroad town of Walkerton.
The township was cut out of Liberty. Chapman (1880) says the settlers in this corner found it so inconvenient to go to the elections that in June 1866 they petitioned the county board to make them a separate township, with Walkerton as the voting place and the name of Lincoln. The board agreed on June 7, 1866, Howard (1907) says, and Lincoln, like Centre, has kept the same boundaries ever since. The first election was held in April 1867 at the Walkerton Hotel, with William A. Haven as inspector; Neely Frame was elected justice of the peace and A. O. Hamilton trustee.
Christian Fulmer and his family made the first settlement in the fall of 1835, and Thomas H. Wiley came the next spring. Howard names Philo Ruggles, Joshua Cole, Thomas Barton, Archibald Goit, Samuel Lorens, Ebenezer Jones, Charles and Jackson Usher, Charles Havens and Morris Frost among those who followed. Chapman says the township was slow to settle, being partly marshy and wet, until about 1850, when settlers came more rapidly and the land was soon taken up.
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The lands along the Kankakee became valuable only through drainage. Howard compares the dredging and straightening of the river and the great drains through St. Joseph, La Porte and Starke counties to the dikes of Holland: the bottoms that had been under water were turned into meadows and cornfields. Farming and stock raising were the township’s business. The first schoolhouse was built in 1858 about a mile from Walkerton and moved into town in 1876, and the Methodists built the first church at Walkerton in 1859, followed by Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, United Brethren and Seventh-day Adventists.
The railroads that crossed at Walkerton, the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago, the Baltimore & Ohio and later the Three I, made the town the township’s market. In 1900 Lincoln had 1,599 people, Howard says, 885 of them in Walkerton, and he wrote that “no section of St. Joseph county has a brighter future.” The Walkerton-Lincoln Township Public Library serves the township today. The 2020 census counted 2,859 people.