Articles by Josh Lange

By Joshua Lange

Published August 21, 2025

Penn Township, St. Joseph County, has been home to famous actors, athletes, scientists, and politicians. One forgotten politician who once called Penn Township home was Kansas Senator William Peffer of the short-lived Populist Party.

Senator William Alfred Peffer was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1831. He came from a family of farmers and engaged in that practice as well, until the California Gold Rush of 1849–50. After success in California, he moved back to Pennsylvania briefly before going to Indiana with his wife, Sarah (Barber) Peffer.

William Peffer’s time in Indiana is mostly shrouded in mystery with few surviving contemporary documents, but this is what we do know. By 1853, he moved to Indiana, where he and Sarah had two children, Charles and Winnie. His time in Indiana would have stayed a footnote until I discovered something by chance. The Mishawaka Enterprise published an obituary of Senator William Peffer in October 1912 that said the following: “For a number of years he [Senator Peffer] resided near Mishawaka.” During this era, residing near Mishawaka meant in the immediate vicinity of Mishawaka, meaning Penn Township. If he lived in another county, city, or township, it would have been stated as such. It is safe to assume that William was a farmer here because of his farming background and the fact that most people who lived in Penn Township outside of Mishawaka in the 1850s were farmers.

Genealogical documents state that his son, Charles, was born in northern Indiana, so it is possible that he was born in Penn Township. It is also not a stretch to assume that William’s daughter, Winnie, probably was born here, too. The most reliable documents of this era would be the U.S. Census; however, William moved to Indiana after the 1850 Census was conducted and migrated to Missouri right before the 1860 Census.

Before moving to Missouri in late 1859, William and his family briefly moved to Crawfordsville to be farmers. What we know for certain is that he lived in Indiana for six years in total and lived in Penn Township for at least a few of those years. It is safe to assume that most of his time in the Hoosier state was spent in the vague Mishawaka area. As we do not know where his property was, it is very possible that the land he owned or leased is now annexed into the City of Mishawaka.

William and his family lived in Missouri until the Civil War encroached too close to his new home, so they packed up everything and moved to Illinois. It was in Illinois where he enlisted in the 83rd Illinois Infantry to help preserve the Union. He served honorably from August 1862 to June 1865. By the end of the war, William was a depot quartermaster in Nashville, Tennessee.

After serving in the Army, William became a lawyer and then moved to Kansas, where he helped start a newspaper. He then became a Republican State Senator for one term. After his one term in office, he became the owner of the Kansas Farmer newspaper. Around this time, a new political movement was forming in the Great Plains, the Farmers’ Alliance, which was a political populist pro-farmer movement that called for economic and political reform. William Peffer joined this movement and used the Kansas Farmer as a way to promote these views and rally the farmers. In 1890, William had built up enough support that he was elected to be a U.S. Senator from Kansas. Prior to the ratification of the 17th Amendment, U.S. Senators were elected by the state legislature.

In the second year of William’s Senate term, the Farmers’ Alliance merged with other political groups into an official third party, named the Populist Party. He was the first incumbent senator to join the Populist Party, serving the rest of his term under their banner. In 1896, he lost re-election by the legislature; however, the Populist Party continued to grow. The party peaked in power in 1898, holding five seats in the U.S. Senate, something unheard of in our modern two-party system. Senator Peffer, despite losing, tried once more to stay in the political limelight, running for Governor of Kansas in 1898 as the nominee of a different third party, the Prohibition Party, only netting a measly 1.42% of the vote.

After the 1898 election, William fell into political obscurity and retired to the plains with his wife. He quietly passed away at his daughter’s home on October 6, 1912, in Grenola, Kansas, at the age of 81.

Any online mention of Senator Peffer states that he lived in Indiana and how he briefly lived near Crawfordsville but does not say where exactly he lived for the other years in the Hoosier state, information that could have been lost to time. Thankfully, we now know definitely that it was here in Penn Township thanks to the Senator’s obituary in the Mishawaka Enterprise. While he only lived here for a few years, William started his family in Penn Township, and it was a steppingstone early in his career that eventually led him to the U.S. Senate. Senator William Peffer is important to our nation’s history as he was one of the few third-party senators, and also local history because he lived in Penn Township and the Mishawaka area.

Senator William A Peffer (1893)