The story
Welcome to Constantine Township
Constantine Township spreads around the village of Constantine, where the Fawn River meets the St. Joseph, and takes in part of the old White Pigeon prairie. Its farms along Broad Street were some of the earliest opened in the county.
The township has about 22,700 acres of land, sixteen hundred of them on White Pigeon prairie and the rest in burr oak and white oak openings, with heavy timber along the river bottoms. The St. Joseph River crosses it from north to southwest, and Mill Creek, which rises in two forks in the northern sections, runs south to the river. The township was part of White Pigeon until 1837.
Settlement began in 1829, when William Meek of Wayne County, Ohio, brought his family to the junction of the Fawn and St. Joseph rivers and began the mills that gave the settlement its first name, Meek’s Mill. Jacob Bonebright of Pennsylvania came the same spring and built the second house; he had stayed the year before with Klinger on the shore of Klinger’s Lake. Charles B. Fitch built the first frame house outside the village in 1830, and the Cathcarts, William Hamilton and his four sons, Heman Harwood and others settled in the openings along Broad Street in 1831 and 1832.
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The township was organized in 1837 and held its first town meeting on April 3 of that year in the village schoolhouse. A bridge over the St. Joseph was built in 1835, and in 1869 the township voted thirteen thousand dollars for an iron suspension bridge. That same year the people offered the Michigan Air Line Railroad a loan of fifty thousand dollars to bring its track through the township, but the company declined and built through Fabius instead. Klinger built a sawmill on Mill Creek in 1830–31, and a Methodist class met on Broad Street, the first religious society outside the village.
The township had 842 people in 1838, 1,496 in 1850 and 2,404, village included, in 1870. Its farms raised wheat, corn and fruit on the rich prairie soil, and several of its farmhouses were engraved for the 1877 county history. The 2020 census counted 4,037 people in Constantine Township, including the village.