The story
Welcome to North Liberty
North Liberty was laid out in the heavy woods of southwestern St. Joseph County in the 1830s by the Antrim family, and grew up on lumber, a planing mill and a wagon works. Railroads reached it late, and today it is the gateway to Potato Creek State Park.
The first settlers of Liberty Township came in 1833 and settled near the site of North Liberty: Jacob and John Earhart, John Kane and Isaac Townsend. Few others came until 1836, when John Rupel arrived, followed by David and Jacob Rupel, James Cole and Joseph Liggett. Chapman (1880) tells how early settlers had to carry their grain to Elkhart to be ground, sometimes waiting nearly a week for their turn, and how a man walking home with a week’s pay of fresh beef might have to drop it for the wolves. Howard (1907) says the people of town and township were “chiefly of the sturdy Pennsylvania German stock.”
Daniel Antrim signed the plat of the Town of North Liberty on January 12, 1836, on the southwest quarter of section 28 and the southeast quarter of section 29, Township 36 North, Range 1 East, with county surveyor Tyra W. Bray’s lines; Main Street was 82½ feet wide and every lot a quarter acre. Chapman says the town was laid out in 1837 by Daniel and James P. Antrim, that no houses stood on the site until James Downey built one, and that Daniel Antrim opened the first store the same year. The township’s first election was held in 1837 at the house of James P. Antrim, and a gristmill was built in town that year.
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Lumber was the business of the place. Chapman counted five sawmills running in the township in 1880. Cole Brothers built a planing mill in 1866 that burned in 1871, and on January 1, 1873, Cole, Ragon & Co. formed the North Liberty Manufacturing Company, which Houser & Knepp took over in 1875; the 1875 county atlas shows its works, with a wagon repository and paint shop. Norman S. Miller opened a large dry-goods store in 1865. The Methodists built the township’s first church here in 1851 and a new one in 1878, the Seventh-day Adventists built in 1868, the Episcopalians a few years later, and a high school went up in 1868.
In 1880 Chapman wrote that the town’s only disadvantage was “the lack of railroad facilities.” The Wabash and the Three I railroads came later and, Howard says, made North Liberty one of the county’s important business centers. The town was incorporated on June 8, 1894; Dell M. Woodward began the North Liberty News on March 23, 1895; and the town had 504 people in 1900. Potato Creek State Park, just outside town, whose Worster Lake filled after its nature preserve was dedicated in 1974, now draws visitors through North Liberty. The 2020 census counted 1,623 people.