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THE MEMOIR RECORD OF PENN TOWNSHIP
The first settlers reached this ground by the river, and the two county histories date them a year earlier than the town's own page does: Chapman states it twice — "William and Timothy Moat settled in what is now known as Penn township" among the arrivals of 1828 (Chapman, Ch. I, p. 332), and in the Penn chapter, "The first settlers were William and Timothy Moat, who located here about 1828, on section 17" (p. 790) — and Howard agrees: "William and Timothy Moat came in 1828" (p. 295). The town's published history, printed by permission of The History Museum of South Bend, puts the arrival in 1829 and adds the route, "presumably coming into the territory via the St. Joseph River," which neither book states. The conflict stands printed: 1828 in both county histories, 1829 on the town's page; the books govern the year as the earlier and agreeing record, and the page's route detail stands as its own unattributed addition. From 1830 the arrival widened: Chapman's Penn list names William Holt, Jesse Skinner, S. L. Cottrell, James Curtis, the Byrkits and the Irelands "soon afterward" (p. 790), and Howard's expanded list adds Jesse Bell, Henry Huntsinger, Jonathan Macy, George W. West, the Hollingsheads, the Edwardses, John McKnight — who in 1834 "entered about 600 acres" and settled his family on the homestead in section 11 — and more (Howard, p. 295; Chapman, p. 827). The township's own first-hand voice is a settler's, but its attribution needs the same care as its dates: the town history quotes the "Memories of Penn Township" of one Samuel Ireland, and neither county history knows that name or that title. What the books do hold is an Ireland who fed memory into the record — S. I. H. Ireland of Mishawaka (born 1807), of whom Chapman writes that he "noted many reminiscences of the past, some of which he has related to us for insertion in this work" (Chapman, p. 819), with Chapman himself dating that Ireland's arrival in Penn to 1829 in one chapter and his coming to the county to 1831 in the sketch. The memoir the town page quotes is printed here as the town history carries it — its beats are the ground's earliest description from inside it — with its provenance stated exactly so: "The Pleasant Valley and Willow Creek neighborhoods were favorite spots for settlement, being on the river and the land being what is known as oak openings, easy of cultivation. Another thriving settlement also located on the south side of the river, being known as Moat's Prairie, after Timothy Moat who first occupied the site. This is now the Eberhart Farm. George West and his son-in-law, Thomas Babcock, located near Osceola, on the bank of the Baugo." The neighborhoods it names — Pleasant Valley, Willow Creek, Moat's Prairie — appear in neither county history; nor does Babcock. The pioneer conditions around them do: Chapman prints that the township's mail was first got at Edwardsville, in Cass County, Michigan, and carried on horseback from Fort Wayne, and that the first wheat was ground at a mill below Niles, Michigan (Chapman, p. 789). And the creek got the locality's first industry inside the settlement's first years: a sawmill stood on the Baugo, near where the village of Osceola now stands, by 1831 or 1832 in Chapman, in 1832 in Howard — the mill is the Story of Osceola section's beat, told there with its own conflicts whole. The land-office entries that converted occupation into title — the township's first entries by name, date and section — belong to The Land; the settlement sequence stands here as the record gives it: arrival 1828, neighborhoods named by the memoir, a mill on the creek by 1831–32, four years and more before there was a plat to name.