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GOV SUPPORTING DUG · CHAPMAN (1880)
Under the town stands the township, and Chapman prints its birth certificate: Lincoln Township was detached from Liberty Township in June 1866, on petition, and named for the martyred president the year after his death. Wm. A. Hawe was appointed trustee to organize it, and Walkerton was made the election place. The first election, April 1867 at the Walkerton Hotel, cast 166 votes: Neely Frame was elected justice of the peace, A. O. Hamilton trustee, and Zebedee James and Samuel Hudelmyer constables. H. J. Kinney held the trusteeship until 1876; by 1880 the justices were S. J. Nichols and Amos H. Stevison and the trustee Silas George. The township's measure, from the same chapter's county table: 13,395 acres, against the town's 135 — the proportions on which this whole build runs, a 135-acre town at the center of a thirteen-thousand-acre township, each with its own government, its own board, and (since 1913) one library between them under both names. The passage also fixes a sequence the founding articles use: the first settlement (Fulmer, fall 1835) precedes the township by thirty years — the settlers governed themselves from Liberty and South Bend for a generation before Lincoln Township existed to govern them.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), History of St. Joseph County, Lincoln Township chapter, p. 733, and the county area table (Lincoln 13,395 acres; Walkerton 135 acres).