Lincoln Township, 1866: the town gets its civil frame

DETACHED FROM LIBERTY, NAMED FOR A PRESIDENT

The town's township is the county's youngest but two, and its boundaries have never moved: Lincoln Township was part of Liberty Township until it was detached in June 1866 on petition, and named — in the first year after the assassination, the record's plain implication — for Lincoln (Chapman, p. 733). Howard prints the instrument: the boundaries were fixed by order of the board of county commissioners on 7 June 1866, the calls beginning at the southwest corner of section 34, township 35 north, range 1 west — the southwest corner of the county itself — and running so that the west boundary ends "at the Kankakee river and the Laporte county line" (Howard, pp. 290–291). Howard notes in his Center Township section what no later order disturbed: Lincoln's boundaries have stood unchanged since formation, a distinction it shares in the county only with Center. The township's first election was held in April 1867 at the Walkerton Hotel, 166 votes cast (Chapman, p. 733); William A. Hawe — the name prints "Haven" in parts of the digitized text — was appointed the township's trustee. The land the new township governed was already changing character: the same drainage that Howard credits for the whole southwest — "with the dredging and straightening of the Kankakee… the rich bottoms that were formerly water covered have been changed into meadows and corn fields" (Howard, pp. 290–291) — was turning Chapman's "marshy and wet" township into the county's corn ground. The township's government from 1866 to its present holders is the Government leg's record; the Story of Walkerton section carries the frame and the first election.