The story
Welcome to Warren Township
Warren Township runs in a long strip west of South Bend from the Michigan line to the old Kankakee marsh, strung with clear glacial lakes. Settled from 1831 by families largely from Ohio, it holds the railroad hamlets of Lydick and Crumstown and much farmland still.
The county board formed Warren on November 5, 1838, and in 1898 replaced the dried-up Kankakee as its southern boundary with the great drainage ditch. Howard (1907) says it was named for Warren County, Ohio, from which many of its first people came; Chapman (1880) says Judge Reynolds Dunn named it for the township in Ohio he came from. It is three and a half miles wide and about ten and a half long. Its lakes run its whole length: Clear Lake, partly in Michigan, then Mud, Deer, Twin and Augustine Lakes, the Chain Lakes in the middle, and Fish or Chamberlain Lake near Portage Township.
Howard thought only the Notre Dame lakes rivaled the beauty of the Chain Lakes, a favorite resort of the Indians long before settlement, near which “the chief prehistoric remains of the county have been found.” They lie a little west of the old portage, and many travelers on the St. Joseph–Kankakee route turned aside there to rest. Early in the 1900s the interurban companies planned pleasure resorts at the lakes.
Read the full story
Reynolds Dunn settled northwest of the Chain Lakes on November 19, 1831, Chapman says. W. W. Brick, Peter Wikoff, George Witter and John Kingery followed in 1832 or 1833, Walter Field and Jesse Frame with his six sons in 1833, the Frames on Portage Prairie, and many others by 1836. Dr. Howell taught school in a log house on section 26 in 1839, and the Dunkards, or German Baptists, built the township’s only church on section 30 in 1879, with 115 members. Three railroads, the Lake Shore, the Grand Trunk and the line from South Bend to St. Joseph, crossed the township.
Two small towns grew on the railroads. On the Lake Shore, about seven miles west of South Bend, a station was called in turn Warren Center, Sweet Home and Lindley, for Ashbury Lindley, who platted it on September 6, 1901; the railroad named it Lydick. On the Grand Trunk, Christian Holler platted Crum’s Point in 1875, now Crumstown. In 1900 Warren had 944 people. Today South Bend’s west side reaches into the township, and the 2020 census counted 7,821.