The story
Welcome to Nottawa Township
Nottawa Township takes its name from Nottawa-seepe, the prairie and the band of Potawatomi who lived beside the creek that crosses it. Unlike most townships, it was settled by a whole colony at once, and it holds the county seat and the 1870 Nottawa Stone School.
Nottawa covers surveyed Township 6 South, Range 10 West, with about 2,600 acres of the old Nottawa prairie, oak openings, and heavy timber along the river bottoms. The St. Joseph crosses its northwest corner and Hog Creek, now the Prairie River, winds through the south and west. The 1877 history gives Nottawa-seepe as the Indian name of the prairie, ‘a prairie by a river,’ and says it was shared by Nottawa, Colon, Mendon and Leonidas. The Nottawa-seepe reservation, set aside for the Potawatomi in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, lay just to the north, and when settlers arrived its people insisted that their land ran farther south than the surveyors’ line.
John W. Fletcher, Captain Moses Allen and George Hubbard saw the prairie in the summer of 1826, following the trail Black Hawk’s band took each year to Malden. William Connor chose land in May 1829 and settled on it that September; John Sturgis, who had sold his first claim on Sturgis prairie, came in August. On Christmas evening 1829 Fletcher brought his family, with William Hazzard and Hiram A. Hecox and theirs, eighteen days over the Chicago trail from Brownstown, and more families followed in 1830. Nottawa, Everts says, was the one township in the county settled by a colony instead of a single pioneer. Fletcher brought thirteen hundred small apple trees in the fall of 1829 and kept them over the winter buried in a beehive.
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Nottawa was part of Sherman Township at first. The legislature set it apart, and its first town meeting was held on April 4, 1831, with Benjamin Sherman as moderator and William Connor as clerk. In 1833 its boundaries changed, and in the 1840s Mendon was set off, leaving Nottawa its present size. Thomas W. Langley built a mill on Hog Creek in 1832–33 with mill-irons brought from Philadelphia, and Captain Henry Powers’s log tavern of 1830, the first hotel on the prairie, held the first post office and was Governor Porter’s headquarters for some days at the time of the ‘big payment’ in December 1833.
In 1864 the township voted fifteen thousand dollars to help build the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, and in 1869 twenty-five thousand dollars for the Michigan Air Line. The railroad made two stations: Nottawa, on the site of the old village of Oporto, took its present name when the line was built in 1867 and became a produce and mint-oil market, and Wasepi was platted in December 1874 at the junction of the two railroads. In 1870 the district east of Nottawa built a fieldstone schoolhouse for about three thousand dollars; it served until the late 1950s. Centreville, the county seat, lies on the township’s western edge. The 2020 census counted 3,685 people in Nottawa Township.