What is a township?

If you live in Indiana, you live in a township.

While you might not know the name of your township or your trustee, he or she may be responsible for ensuring that fire trucks show up at your house if it ever catches on fire. In the event that you fall behind on your bills, your trustee’s office — whether in an urban office building, a suburban strip mall or a private home at the lonely end of a rural road — is supposed to be a place where you can turn for help.

Trustees take care of rural cemeteries across the state.

Every inch of Indiana is covered by townships, which are unique in their ubiquity.

“No other state has a universal layer of township government,” the authors of the Kernan-Shepard Commission report wrote in 2007. The report, of course, recommended that townships be eliminated.