The story
Welcome to Sturgis Township
Sturgis Township, a half township on the Indiana line around the city of Sturgis, was the last township set off in the county, in 1845. It covers most of Sturgis prairie, where the first public land in St. Joseph County was entered in 1828.
The township covers the part of surveyed Township 8 South, Range 10 West, that lies in Michigan, a little more than half a government township with about 13,400 acres of land and twenty-five of water. It is named for the prairie, which took its name from its first settler, Judge John Sturgis. Fawn River bends through its southeastern sections, and Green Lake lies in the northwest. The oval prairie, with its fertile sandy loam, was considered one of the most beautiful spots in the county.
The first public land entered in St. Joseph County was here: Ezekiel Metcalf of Cattaraugus County, New York, entered the east half of the northeast quarter of section 1 on June 14, 1828. George Buck came that summer and built the first house on the site of Sturgis, and John B. Clarke, Truman Bearss and Jacob Hopkins followed the same year. Buck and Ephraim Bearss broke and fenced a seventy-five-acre field in 1829, plowing with four to ten yoke of oxen. The first school met in the fall of 1830 in the upper room of Philip H. Buck’s house, with Dr. Henry, the first physician on the prairie, as teacher.
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Many settlers came from Livingston County, New York, and the sickly years of the 1830s were hard; John S. Newhall remembered thirty-two ague shakes in as many days, and in 1837 he helped bury fourteen people on the prairie. The land was part of Sherman Township until the winter session of 1845, when the legislature set it off and named it Sturgis, the last township constituted in the county. Judge Sturgis owned 1,450 acres in Sturgis and Sherman when he died in 1874, and Isaac Runyan brought purebred shorthorn cattle to the township in 1870.
The state census of 1874 counted 2,248 people in the township. The city of Sturgis has since grown to cover the northeast corner of the township, but the rest is still farmland on the old prairie. The 2020 census counted 2,042 people in Sturgis Township, outside the city.