The story
Welcome to Centreville
Centreville has been the seat of St. Joseph County since the early 1830s, when its proprietors gave the county a public square and fifty-six lots to build on. It is still a small village of about thirteen hundred people around its courthouse, and three miles north the 1887 Langley Covered Bridge carries traffic over the St. Joseph River.
The village plat was surveyed and recorded on November 7, 1831, by Robert Clark, Jr., a government surveyor, with Electra W. Deane, Daniel B. Miller and Charles Noble. It straddled the line between Nottawa and Lockport townships, which is why the village still lies in both. In return for the county seat, the proprietors gave the county fifty-six lots and the public square for a courthouse. The seat of justice had first been fixed on the plat of St. Joseph, at the site of Three Rivers, but the decision was reconsidered when Centreville’s owners offered more. The first house on the site was a rough log hut, without door, window or floor, that Columbia Lancaster used as a hunting shelter.
The man who made the paper town real was Thomas W. Langley, a Philadelphia manufacturer who came west for his health in 1832. Lancaster guided him to the site, and Langley bought most of the prospective village, went home for his family and a set of mill-irons, and arrived with them on October 3, 1832. Cutler (1911) says that in about three months he put up a frame courthouse, the largest log house in the county for a hotel, a blacksmith shop, a store, and a saw and flour mill. By February 1833 there were eight good frame buildings, and by May the county capital had a hundred people. That year the courts and the board of supervisors began meeting in Centreville and a county jail was built.
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The little frame courthouse served until the county built its own. On February 22, 1841, the county commissioners voted to put up a wooden courthouse in the center of the public square; it was finished in the fall of 1842 at a cost of about seven thousand dollars. The Masonic grand lodge of Michigan laid the cornerstone of the present courthouse on September 7, 1899, and it was completed the next year. In 1837 Langley and the Talbots began the Exchange hotel, and the Reformed Dutch congregation organized in the village on April 8, 1839.
Centreville was first incorporated in 1837, with its first trustees elected on May 1; that government lapsed by about 1840, and the village was not incorporated again until February 23, 1877. George Talbot and Henry D. Cushman built the first flour mill in the village in 1851, and in the early 1870s farmers and merchants organized the Centreville Knit Goods Manufacturing Company. The railroads missed the village itself: the Grand Rapids and Indiana ran through the eastern part of the township, and the Michigan Central Air Line, finished in 1871, passed about a mile north, where the village depot stood.
In 1911 Cutler described Centreville as a village of about seven hundred people just north of the Michigan Central and south of the Prairie River, with its own water and electric plant, opened in 1898. It has stayed the county’s seat of government. The Langley Covered Bridge, built in 1887 by Pierce Bodmer of Parkville for Lockport and Nottawa townships, is a 282-foot Howe truss of three spans and still carries Covered Bridge Road; the village’s summer festival, Covered Bridge Days, began in 1975. The 2020 census counted 1,319 people in Centreville.
