The story
Welcome to Union Township
Union Township lies on the Michigan Road in the south-central part of the county, around the town of Lakeville. Early travelers dismissed its wet timberland as nearly worthless, but drainage made it some of the county’s choicest farmland, and near Potato Creek lay the Huggart Settlement of free Black farmers.
The county board formed Union on March 6, 1837, Howard (1907) says, taking land south of Centre that had been part of Greene, and later added sections from Madison. Chapman (1880) dates its organization to 1835 and says that before the first township election, held at Earl’s tavern in April 1836, its voters had to go to South Bend. Many settlers passing through on their way elsewhere, Chapman writes, thought it “an almost worthless tract of land on account of the marshes,” a vast pond in the wet season with here and there a dry spot, so it was settled later than its neighbors.
The first settlements were on the Michigan Road lands. Elijah Lineback moved his family to section 35 in the spring of 1833; John Henderson, John Gardner and John, Jacob and Mark Rector came the same year, and Hubbard Henderson in 1834. John and James Moon came in 1834–35, and James Annis, Michael Hupp, Abijah Mills, William H. Robertson, Henry Hardy, Esau Lamb, Daniel Glenn, Amos Heston and Henry and John Riddle by 1837. Heavy walnut, ash, oak, hickory and whitewood made lumbering and milling a good business once railroads opened a market. Chapman also reports arrowheads and other relics found on sections 6 and 8, and stone-lined pits shaped like kettles whose purpose no one in the neighborhood could explain.
Read the full story
The first school was a log house built in 1836 on a corner of James Moon’s farm, where James Roberson of South Bend taught a subscription school that winter to about twenty pupils. The Methodists, organized about 1839, built the township’s first church a mile north of Lakeville and later a church in the village; the United Brethren moved to Olive Branch and built a church there in 1878; the Adventists, who held tent meetings in 1862, built in 1880; and a union church went up in the northeast in 1875. Just east of today’s Potato Creek State Park, the Huggart Settlement of free Black farmers lasted from 1834 into the 1890s.
Drainage, Howard wrote, had given Union “some of the choicest farms of the county.” Lakeville, its only town, grew on the Michigan Road and then on the Vandalia and Wabash railroads. Chapman found Lakeville in 1880 a pleasant village of several hundred people, with stores, a hotel, a sawmill and a gristmill, two churches and a school, though it still had no railroad. In 1900 the township, with Lakeville, had 1,733 people. The 2020 census counted 3,478.