The story
Welcome to Constantine
Constantine grew around William Meek’s mills where the Fawn River runs into the St. Joseph, and for twenty years it was the busiest shipping point on the upper river. It was the home of Governor John S. Barry, and its brick main street is a National Register historic district.
William Meek of Wayne County, Ohio, chose the land where the Fawn River, then called Crooked Creek, joins the St. Joseph, and brought his family in the spring of 1829. That winter he began a sawmill, and the next spring, before it was finished, he threw a rough dam across the creek and set up a wheel and stones to grind grain, with Hugh Woods as millwright. For years the hamlet was known as Meek’s Mills. Meek surveyed the village plat in August 1831, when only five families lived there, and the name Constantine, suggested by the merchant Niles F. Smith, was long ignored by settlers at rival White Pigeon, who would tell travelers they must mean Meek’s Mills.
Smith opened the first store in 1830 in a little frame building on the riverbank. By 1835 the village had about three hundred people, and 1836 brought new stores, wagon and plow makers, a jeweler and a newspaper, the Republican, which advertised the town’s water power. A steamboat named Constantine was projected and a keelboat of the same name carried produce and goods, and the Bank of Constantine opened on March 3, 1837. The crash of that year ended many of the bigger plans. The village was first incorporated in the spring of 1837; that corporation lapsed in 1839, and Constantine was incorporated again on March 15, 1861.
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The river kept the town busy. In 1831 Elias S. Swan unloaded a stock of goods for White Pigeon on the bank at Constantine and left it overnight in the woods, unwatched and untouched. Until the railroad came, Lima, Indiana, shipped all its produce and received its merchandise through Constantine, and the bridge over the St. Joseph was built on piles with a high arch to let steamboats pass. In 1869 the township voted thirteen thousand dollars for an iron suspension bridge. After the Michigan Southern Railroad came through, river navigation ended and the old warehouse was moved up onto the bank.
John S. Barry came from White Pigeon to keep store in Constantine about 1834. He served three terms in the state senate and was three times elected governor, and he helped manage the Michigan Southern Railroad. The house he built in 1835 on North Washington Street is now the Governor John S. Barry Museum. By 1877 the village had flour mills, the George and Tweedale foundry and a union school, and in 1911 Cutler photographed its bridge and electric light and power plant on the river.
The two-story business blocks along Washington and Water streets form the Constantine Historic Commercial District, listed on the National Register in 1985. General Harry Hill Bandholtz, who headed the American military mission to Hungary after the First World War, was a native of the village. The 2020 census counted 1,947 people in Constantine.
