The first three churches: Presbyterian, Evangelical, and Christian

THE SETTLEMENT CENTURY, AS OF HOWARD (1907)

The whole organized religion of the nineteenth-century township fits in one sentence of the county history: "The churches that have been organized in Harris township are the Presbyterian, the Evangelical and the Christian." Howard's Harris Township sketch, published in 1907, gives the three names and nothing more — no founding dates, no buildings, no pastors, no burying grounds attached to any of them. The leg prints the sentence at its full weight and its full limit: it is the founding roll of this ground's congregational life, and it is also nearly all the nineteenth-century record that survives in print for any of the three. Around the sentence, the sketch seats the human frame the churches served. The settlers of 1830 included Jacob Harris himself; Adam Miller, identified by Howard as a Baptist preacher — a preacher of a fourth communion present on the ground from the first year, though Howard organizes no Baptist church here; the Baldwins; Samuel Bell; and Adam Ringle. The township's first schoolhouse, a log room fourteen feet by sixteen, doubled in the ordinary frontier pattern as the kind of room in which preaching and class meetings happened before any church building stood, though the record does not say so for this room and the leg does not claim it. The three organized churches are followed in the next entries at the depth their descendants and records allow: the Evangelical line descends, documented, to the present New Salem United Methodist Church on Ash Road; the Christian line descends, documented, to the Harris Prairie Church of Christ; the Presbyterian line ends in the surviving record with Howard's sentence — no deed, directory, or denominational minute reached by this section carries it forward, and its course after 1907 is a named gap, settler: the records of the Presbyterian Church's regional judicatory for St. Joseph County and the deed books of Harris Township, neither of which this section could read first-hand.

One more first belongs to the frame rather than to any congregation. Clay Township, the CDP's western half, was organized May 5, 1840, and its earliest settlement ran along the St. Joseph River — ground that is Portage and German township country in the county's religious record, west of the designated place. Howard's Clay sketch seats no church on the ground the CDP took from Clay, and neither does any later record this section reached: the designated place's Clay-side congregations are all twentieth-century seats, entered below in their order. The county's first erected church building — a German Baptist brick church of 1851, its congregation organized in 1831 — stood in German Township, west of this ground entirely; it is printed in the boundary entry, not here.

Sources:

1. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1, Harris Township sketch (ch. VIII, sec. 3) and Clay Township sketch, read first-hand — the three-church sentence, the 1830 settler list with Adam Miller "a Baptist preacher," the log schoolhouse, and the township organization dates.
2. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), German Township sketch — the 1831/1851 German Baptist congregation and church, boundary-printed in this section's boundary entry.