The story
Welcome to White Pigeon Township
White Pigeon prairie was the first place in St. Joseph County that settlers chose, in 1826 and 1827, and for years it was the gateway through which the families of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana came. The township keeps the prairie, Klinger Lake and the grave of Wahbememe, the leader whose name it bears.
The township covers surveyed Township 8 South, Range 11 West, with a strip of Range 12 and three sections taken from Florence. The 1877 history describes a level plain of burr and white oak openings and about a thousand acres of the famous White Pigeon prairie, watered by the Pigeon and Fawn rivers and by Klinger’s Lake, the largest at about seven hundred acres, named for Peter Klinger. The prairie and township take their name from Wahbememe, White Pigeon, a Potawatomi leader whose people long visited his grave just west of the village.
John Winchell of Wayne County, Michigan, settled at the west end of the prairie on April 10, 1827, and Leonard Cutler came from Indiana to the east end that May; Arba Heald, who had picked the land with Winchell the fall before, brought his family in January 1828. The three divided the prairie by plowing two furrows across it. Cutler’s daughter Mary, born early in 1828, was the first child born in the county, and James Knapp and Martha Winchell were married at the judge’s house that year. Winchell was the first postmaster, of an office called Millville, and carried the mail on horseback between Coldwater and Niles.
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Luther Newton sawed lumber at his mill on Crooked Creek, now the Fawn River, in the fall of 1829, the first mill in the county. The Phelps brothers started the settlement of Newville east of the village in 1828–29, where a Methodist class formed in 1829 and the first schoolhouse in the county was built in the summer of 1830. White Pigeon was one of the county’s three original townships, organized on October 29, 1829, and at first it took in the whole southwestern quarter of the county; Buck’s, Florence, Constantine and Mottville were cut from it between 1833 and 1837. Its first town meeting met at Savery’s ‘Old Diggins’ in April 1830, though the early records burned in 1851.
The Chicago Road, surveyed through the township from east to west, carried the stagecoaches, and in the busy years after 1836 there were five taverns between White Pigeon and Sturgis. Daniel Shurtz and his brothers Frederick, John and James came from Pennsylvania in 1836, and ‘Father’ Elisha White brought improved hogs and shorthorn cattle in 1835. In 1909 the Alba Columba Club placed a boulder at Wahbememe’s grave; the St. Joseph County Historical Society now keeps the site as a small memorial park. The 2020 census counted 3,762 people in White Pigeon Township, including the village.
