The story
Welcome to Mottville Township
Mottville Township lies in the southwest corner of the county, where the old Chicago Road crossed the St. Joseph River at a ford long called the Grand Traverse. Its little village was once the most important shipping point in the county, and four bridges have stood at the crossing.
The township is made up of surveyed Township 8 South, Range 12 West, less its eastern tier of sections, which stayed with White Pigeon, and a fraction of Range 13 east of the St. Joseph that once belonged to Cass County. The St. Joseph forms its western boundary and the Pigeon River crosses it to join the St. Joseph. Some sixteen hundred acres were part of White Pigeon prairie; the rest was burr and white oak openings. The site of the village was known for years as the Grand Traverse of the St. Joseph, where the Chicago trail crossed the river.
Joseph Quimby settled on the site of the village in 1828, and Levi Beckwith came to the west end of White Pigeon prairie that August with his wife and four children. Aaron Brooks of Ohio came in 1829, raised the township’s first wheat, and lived on the same farm in 1877. Elias Taylor, the oldest Indian trader at the crossing and the first sheriff of the county, built the first frame house in 1830, which served as store, tavern and post office, and planted the first nursery in 1829. Orange Risdon and John R. Williams surveyed the village plat on May 31, 1830.
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Hart L. Stewart built the first bridge across the St. Joseph in 1833 as a military crossing, using sixteen thousand feet of timber, some of it in sixty-foot pieces; a pile bridge replaced it in 1845, and an arched wooden bridge on stone piers in 1867. Keelboats poled up the river to the village, and at one time, Everts was told, fourteen thousand barrels of flour waited at Mottville for spring navigation. The county’s first real Fourth of July celebration was held in 1830 in the upper room of the Stewart warehouse above the bridge.
Mottville was part of White Pigeon until 1837; its first township meeting was held on April 3, 1837, at the village schoolhouse, and Andrew Thompson was elected supervisor. Methodist missionaries preached in the settlement in 1829 and 1830, a Methodist class formed in 1832, and the Methodists built a church in 1846. Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church was organized on July 5, 1857, and built its own church at Mottville in 1869. By 1877 most people of the township did their business at White Pigeon and Constantine, though Mottville kept its post office.
The present concrete camelback bridge was built in 1922 and, at 270 feet, is the longest of its kind surviving in Michigan; since a new bridge opened beside it in 1990 it has carried only people on foot. The 2020 census counted 1,444 people in Mottville Township.