The story
Welcome to Leonidas Township
Leonidas, in the northeast corner of St. Joseph County, was meant to be called Fort Pleasant, and got its Greek name through a clerk’s slip in the legislature. Its heavy timber went down the St. Joseph as flour arks, and the mills of the Cowen brothers and the hamlet of Factoryville stood on Nottawa Creek.
Leonidas covers surveyed Township 5 South, Range 9 West, bordered by Kalamazoo County on the north and Branch County on the east. About half of it was covered with heavy beech, maple, whitewood and walnut, and the finest whitewood lumber in the county was cut here and made into the arks that carried the county’s flour down the river. The St. Joseph crosses the southwest corner, and Nottawa Creek runs through the township to meet it. Part of the Nottawa-seepe reservation, set aside for the Potawatomi in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, lay in the township, and the 1877 history places a permanent village of thirty or forty Potawatomi lodges on a level plain here in the 1830s, where the ‘Reserve school’ later stood.
A trader named Hatch built a shanty in the winter of 1830–31, but the first real settlers were George Mathews and his wife, who came from New York City in May 1831 and settled near the present bridge in section 32; Mrs. Mathews was the first white woman in the township and mother of its first child. Alexander Foreman’s family came days later, and his daughters ran a ferry on the St. Joseph. James and Robert Cowen of Pennsylvania bought a mill site on Nottawa Creek that November, and Captain Levi Watkins built a cabin on the creek in the fall of 1832.
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The Cowens finished a sawmill in the winter of 1832–33 and built a flour mill in 1836; the post office, opened at Cowen’s Mills in 1834, was called Fort Pleasant, the name Captain Watkins wanted for the township after an ancient earthwork there. In 1836 the township was set off from Colon, and the first town meeting was held on April 4, 1836, at the house of Martin C. Watkins. But Jackson County had asked the same session of the legislature for a township named Leonidas, and the engrossing clerk, copying the bill for both townships, put that name on the St. Joseph County township by mistake.
In 1842–43 William, Charles and Nathan Schofield built a woolen factory at the mills on Nottawa Creek in section 1, and the hamlet there was called Factoryville. E. G. Terry laid out the village of Leonidas on December 30, 1846, in section 12, where the old Washtenaw trail crossed the roads to Mendon and Colon. A Presbyterian society was organized at Cowen’s Mills in 1837, and the Methodists built their meeting house in the village in 1854–56. Lyman Bishop, Jr., and his brother James built the first brick houses in the township. The 2020 census counted 1,161 people in Leonidas Township.