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Chapman (1880), the township chapters; Howard (1907), Chapter VIII
Clay Township was formed 5 May 1840, named for Henry Clay — Chapman: "at the June session of the Board of County Commissioners in 1840, an order was passed constituting Clay a separate township, and it was named after Henry Clay, who was just in the prime of his political glory." Howard prints its bounds "as they have since remained": "Bounded on the north by the Michigan state line, on the east by the middle line of range three east, on the south by the south line of congressional township thirty-eight, and on the west by the St. Joseph river" — the east halves of sections 9, 16, 21, 28 and 33 of Township 38, Range 3 East having been added from Harris and Penn by the order of 7 December 1842. Before the township existed, its ground was Portage, afterwards German, township ground.
The first settlements were river settlements, a decade before the township: Benjamin Potter, John Hague and William McCombs came in 1829, John and Peter Cripe and Thomas Longley in 1830, Peter and Jacob Eaton in 1831 — Chapman places the first settlement "along the eastern bank of the St. Joseph river." The township the town would one day be carved from was small and, in Chapman's words, had by way of villages "none" — a settler-chronicle fact the tribes fragment's village test carries whole, because it is also the township's Indigenous record: the county histories name no village, reserve, burial ground or mission in Clay Township at all.