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Spring 1833 and after
The township was settled along the road. Howard (1907) states the frame in one sentence: "The first settlements in this township were on the Michigan road lands." The two county histories agree on the year, the first man, and the first families. Chapman (1880): "The first settlement in the township was in the spring of 1833, when Elijah Lineback moved his family here. He erected a cabin on section 35. The same year came John Henderson with his family and settled on section 25. John, Jacob and Mark Rector came on section 1 some time in 1833. Hubbard Henderson came in 1834 and settled on section 35." John Moon took up land on section 28 in 1835 and his brother James on section 34; James Annis, Michael Hupp, Abijah Mills, William H. Robertson, Henry Hardy, Esau Lamb and Daniel Glenn came about 1836; Amos Heston and Henry and John Riddle in 1837 — Howard's list adds John Gardner and a roll of other very early names, and the two tellings stand together. The ground they took was not at first thought much of: heavily timbered clay and marsh land, passed over as near worthless until it was drained, after which, Howard writes, "some of the choicest farms of the county are to be found in Union township." A modern compilation dates the area's first Euro-American settlement to 1836; both county histories say the spring of 1833, and the conflict prints in this build's register, unmerged. 2986); the settlement he founded, in Union Township northwest of Lakeville, grew through the following decades, reached its greatest size about 1880, and disappeared in the 1890s (Karst, Indiana Magazine of History).