The story
Welcome to Penn Township
Penn Township is the largest in the county, stretching along both banks of the St. Joseph from South Bend to the Elkhart County line. It holds Mishawaka and Osceola, and its great marsh south of the river, once a trap for travelers, became the peppermint fields of the “peppermint capital” of Indiana.
Penn was one of the three townships the county board laid out on May 6, 1832, taking in everything east of Range 2 East. Harris, Madison and parts of Clay, Centre, Union and Portage were later carved from it, yet Howard (1907) says it remained the largest township, with sixty-five and a half sections. The St. Joseph flows west through its north part, fed by Twin Branch and Baugo Creek from the south. Chapman (1880) describes a marsh three-quarters of a mile to two miles wide running southeast from near South Bend almost the length of the township, with an “Island” of two or three hundred acres in the middle; Howard identifies it as the swamp in which La Salle lost his way in December 1679.
The first settlers were William and Timothy Moat, about 1828, on section 17. William Holt, Jesse Skinner, Samuel L. Cottrell, James Curtis, the Byrkits, the Irelands, the Hollingsheads, the Edwardses and the Websters followed. Chapman says the pioneers first had their wheat ground at a mill below Niles, that the first election was held in 1832 with Alpheus Ireland among the first justices, and that Nathan W. Young, who carried chain for the government surveyors, gave his name to Young’s Prairie in Michigan. The first schoolhouse was built in 1832, and the same year a sawmill went up on Baugo Creek near the later Osceola.
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Much of the township’s public life, Howard says, centered on Mishawaka, platted in 1833 at the rapids, and to a lesser degree on Osceola, platted in 1837. The Lake Shore railroad and the Grand Trunk crossed the township, and an interurban joined it to South Bend and Goshen by 1900. Except in the south and in the lowlands, Howard says, its soil was a fertile sand and gravel; the south part was like neighboring Madison.
Drainage turned the marsh into the township’s most fertile land, and Howard, quoting an Indianapolis News report of 1906, called Mishawaka “the peppermint capital of the Indiana industry,” with nearly a thousand acres of mint around it. Elam Eller of St. Joseph County was probably the first Indiana grower, and the Woodward brothers, who came from Michigan about 1889, grew 320 acres and distilled more than 4,000 pounds of oil in 1906. Outside Mishawaka, Penn had 2,557 people in 1900. The 2020 census counted 68,698 in the township, including most of Mishawaka.