The story
Welcome to Madison Township
Madison Township, in the southeast corner of the county, was the last part of it to be settled: a wet, heavily timbered clay country that waited until 1840 for its first farmers. German and Pennsylvania families cleared it with sawmills and ditches, and its crossroads hamlets of Woodland and Wyatt grew up among the mills and on the railroad.
Madison was set off on March 4, 1845, Howard (1907) says, when what was left of Penn Township was divided by an east–west line through the middle of Township 36 North; the southern part was named Madison and the northern kept the name Penn. It runs from that line south to the Marshall County line and east to Elkhart County. Chapman (1880) calls it one of the latest settled townships in the county, its land then thought the poorest for farming, “marsh and covered with heavy timber,” so that a visitor might think himself in some new Western country where the work of clearing had just begun.
Chapman names Mr. Cline on section 19 and Mr. Bennett on section 18 as probably the earliest settlers, with Christian Helminger in 1840, Godfried Enders in 1841 and many more after 1850, among them Adam Kieffer, Christian Grose, Philip Berger, Adam Rader, Michael Kettring, the Jewells, Jacob Hetzel and Adam Mochel. The south part, where the Yellow River flows, was called the Yellow River country. The first justices were Allen Mead and Mr. Bennett, and the first lawsuit, over the shooting of a deer, was settled before it came to trial. Chapman also tells of early settlers who planted fruit trees, fell sick and left, and of the orchards later found growing wild among the forest trees.
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Howard explains how the township was won: “The sawmill and the ditch converted the forbidding region into the most valuable farming section of the county,” the mills turning the timber into lumber while the drains made the land dry enough to plow. Its people, like those of Union and southern Penn, were “to a great extent, of the vigorous Pennsylvania stock.” A fire in 1871 burned timber and fences in the east. The first church was a log house at Woodland, built by the Methodists and later bought by the Evangelicals; the Evangelical Association built a church near the Yellow River in 1864, and the German Lutherans built at Woodland in 1868.
Woodland, at the corner of sections 15, 16, 21 and 22, was never platted but had stores, sawmills, a physician and a post office from 1856 to 1907; it had ninety people in 1900. Wyatt, on the Wabash railroad in the south, was platted on March 27, 1894, by Jeremiah and Louisa Bechtel as a shipping town for the newly drained farms, and had 170 people by 1900. Howard noted that Madison had the only rural high school in the county. The township had 2,204 people in 1900; the 2020 census counted 1,795.