The township's farm problem, as its first farmers told it

Chapman (1880), History of St. Joseph County, the Clay Township settler narrative — LDSGenealogy transcription, the carrier's own accuracy caveat standing

Clay Township's agriculture began as an argument about its soil, and the county's first history records the argument and its settlement. The township's uplands were oak openings — white oak, black oak, burr oak and black hickory on land settlers at first thought hardly worth buying from the Government: in the narrative Chapman prints, "it was commonly considered at that early period that the white and black oak barrens of Clay and Harris townships were hardly worth buying… that three or four crops would exhaust the soil, and the land become worthless; and the first few years of cultivation did seem to have that effect." The recovery is printed in the same breath: "the introduction and use of land plaster and cultivation of clover has not only restored these lands to their original fertility, but… made them better," until it stood "a question among good farmers… whether these lands are not as profitable as the prairie lands." That is the township's agricultural foundation document — barrens doubted, then farmed into standing by plaster and clover — and the town of Indian Village sits on the eastern end of that same oak-opening ground.

The township the argument produced was a farm township of family holdings. Goodspeed's 1893 biographical record, at the same transcription strength, sketches it farm by farm: John Fickenscher, a German miller turned Clay Township farmer from about 1853, owner of 160 acres at his death in 1882, his son farming the homestead's eighty; Joseph E. Mulligan's "beautiful and well-tilled farm of 136 acres" in the township, twelve of them timber. Holdings of eighty to two hundred acres, part timber, worked by the families who held them — that is the scale Clay Township agriculture kept from its settlement into the county's suburban century, and it is the countryside the town's section belonged to.