The story
Welcome to Lockport Township
Lockport Township surrounds the city of Three Rivers, where the Portage and Rocky rivers join the St. Joseph. Its name recalls the canal, lock and water power promoters planned there in 1836, and the Langley Covered Bridge still crosses the St. Joseph on its eastern edge.
Lockport covers surveyed Township 6 South, Range 11 West, about 22,900 acres with little marsh and high bluffs along its streams. The St. Joseph winds through it from northeast to southwest; the Portage comes down from Park Township to meet it at Three Rivers, and the Rocky joins just below. Hog Creek, now the Prairie River, crosses the southern sections, and part of Fisher’s Lake lies in the north, named for Jonas and Leonard Fisher, who settled on its shore in 1834. The township took its name, the 1877 history says, from the great water power projected on the St. Joseph within its bounds.
Jacob McInterfer made the first settlement in the spring of 1829 on the west side of the Rocky River, living in his wagons until he built a hewn-log house; George Buck followed in 1830 and kept the first tavern. In 1831 Charles B. Fitch, later a county judge, entered two hundred acres in section 31 with a mill site on Hog Creek and built a sawmill there in 1832. A carding machine and shingle mill were added in 1838, and for a few years the village of Eschol was the most promising hamlet outside Three Rivers, but trade drifted toward the larger water power, and after its dam went out in 1840 Eschol was abandoned.
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On March 29, 1833, the land of present Lockport and Fabius was set off from White Pigeon as Buck’s Township, named for George Buck. In 1840 Lockport was divided from it as a separate township. Boats were built at Lockport for the river trade, and in the decade after 1834 Captain Millard and Captain Alvin Calhoon of Florence were busy running arks of flour down the St. Joseph. In 1871 the township voted $7,500 toward a bridge over the river, and the First Evangelical Church of Lockport was organized that year east of Three Rivers.
In 1887 Lockport and Nottawa townships had Pierce Bodmer of Parkville build the Langley Covered Bridge over the St. Joseph north of Centreville; it is a 282-foot Howe truss of three spans and still carries Covered Bridge Road. Bucks township had 782 people in 1838, and in 1874 Lockport, with Three Rivers, had 3,892. The 2020 census counted 3,729 people in Lockport Township, outside the city of Three Rivers.