The story
Welcome to Fawn River Township
Fawn River is a small township, little more than half the usual size, on the Indiana line east of Sturgis. The first furrows on Sturgis prairie were turned here in 1827, and the Toll family’s mills made Fawn River village a busy place for half a century.
The township lies in surveyed Township 8 South, Range 9 West, and has only about 13,440 acres, bounded by Burr Oak on the north, Sturgis on the west, Branch County on the east and LaGrange County, Indiana, on the south. It takes its name from the Fawn River, earlier called Crooked Creek, which crosses its southern sections. A chain of small lakes, among them Sweet Lake and Cade Lake, drains into the river, and their beds of marl were once burned for lime.
In August 1827 Judge John Sturgis and George Thurston broke ten acres on the eastern edge of Sturgis prairie, in section 6, and sowed wheat; Sturgis built a house there the next spring, the first on the prairie, and entered the land at Monroe on October 22, 1828. The first post office on the prairie opened here in 1829 with Samuel Stewart as postmaster. Ebenezer Sweet built a log tavern on the Chicago Road beside the lake that bears his name in 1835–36, and Freeman A. Tisdel laid out the little village of Freedom, also on the Chicago Road.
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Captain Philip R. Toll came in 1836, built a sawmill and flour mill at what became Fawn River village, and moved his family there in 1838. The township, part of Sherman until then, was organized by the legislature in 1838, and its first town meeting was held at Tisdel’s tavern at Freedom on April 2, 1838. The first schoolhouse was a log house at Freedom in 1836, and a frame school followed at Fawn River village in 1839. In 1844 the post office moved to Fawn River mills, with Isaac D. Toll as postmaster; he later served in the Mexican War.
Another flour mill and distillery was built on the river in 1840, burned, and was rebuilt in 1869. Fawn River village never grew into a town, but its mills ground for the countryside for decades. The township’s District No. 3 schoolhouse is a state historic site. Wikipedia gives the township’s 2020 census population as 1,587.