Michigan · St. Joseph River Valley
St. Joseph County
River towns, prairies and Amish farms along the upper St. Joseph.
Project Scroll is an independent local-history website. This is not an official page of St. Joseph County or of any township, city or village in it. For official business, contact the county or local offices directly.
Welcome
St. Joseph County, Michigan
St. Joseph County lies wholly in the St. Joseph River’s own watershed, on the Indiana line between Branch and Cass counties. It was set off and organized in 1829 and takes its name from the river; Centreville is the county seat.
About 60,900 people live here today (60,939 at the 2020 census), in Sturgis, Three Rivers and a ring of villages, sixteen townships and the oldest Amish community in Michigan. Pick a place to begin.
Cities and villages
SturgisCity · Sherman, then Ivanhoe, then Sturgis: a prairie town on the Chicago Road.
Three RiversCity · Where the Rocky and the Portage meet the St. Joseph.
Burr OakVillage · A railroad village that would not stay Lock’s Station.
CentrevilleVillage · The county seat a Philadelphia manufacturer built in a season.
ColonVillage · Named from a dictionary, famous for magic.
ConstantineVillage · Meek’s Mills at the mouth of the Fawn, once the county’s river port.
MendonVillage · A French trading post on the St. Joseph that grew into a mill village.
White PigeonVillage · The first village plat in the county, and its first land office.
Townships
- Burr Oak TownshipTownship · Burr oak openings on the Branch County line.
Colon TownshipTownship · Lakes, mounds and the Farrand farms along the St. Joseph.- Constantine TownshipTownship · Prairie farms around the mouth of the Fawn.
Fabius TownshipTownship · The lake township: knobs, prairie and twenty-one hundred acres of water.- Fawn River TownshipTownship · Where Sturgis prairie was first plowed, and the Tolls built their mills.
- Florence TownshipTownship · Burr oak plains named for the queen of the sea, and a banner mint township.
- Flowerfield TownshipTownship · Named for the wildflowers that bloomed after the fall fires.
- Leonidas TownshipTownship · Named by a clerk’s mistake, in the hardwood corner of the county.
Lockport TownshipTownship · Named for a water power that was planned on a grand scale.- Mendon TownshipTownship · Once Wakeman, renamed for two Mendons back east.
- Mottville TownshipTownship · The Grand Traverse of the St. Joseph, where the Chicago Road crossed.
- Nottawa TownshipTownship · Nottawa-seepe, ‘a prairie by a river.’
- Park TownshipTownship · Oak groves and openings that looked like a gentleman’s park.
- Sherman TownshipTownship · Mother township of the southeast, with seven lakes and an English pioneer.
- Sturgis TownshipTownship · The last township formed, on the county’s first land entry.
White Pigeon TownshipTownship · Where the settlement of St. Joseph County began in 1827.