The farming century

1830–1900

For seventy years the place was farms, a schoolhouse, and three churches: the prairie took the plow, and the institutions of a farm township followed at farm scale. The first schoolhouse in Harris Township was built of logs, fourteen feet by sixteen, and its first schoolmaster was Robert Kennedy — one of the early settlers' own number, teaching in a room smaller than a modern garage. By the time Howard wrote in 1907, three churches had been organized in the township: Presbyterian, Evangelical, and Christian. That is the whole institutional roster of the nineteenth-century place at the strength the county history gives it, and the Story of Granger section prints it at that size rather than dressing it: no village plat competed with the farmsteads, no mill seat rose on the creeks, and the township's economy was the prairie's — grain and livestock on some of the finest upland in the county, with the low ground progressively ditched into use. The century's texture is in its proportions: a township next to the smallest in the county, whose entire population in 1900 the next entry gives, farming under a name that was a neighbor's surname.

Sources:

1. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1, ch. VIII, sec. 3, pp. 279–280, read first-hand.