Osceola Farms and Agriculture: The Working of Penn Township

Farms & Agriculture · The Working of Penn Township

Penn Township was farming ground before it was anything else, and for a century and a half farming was nearly all it was. It was the county's largest township — sixty-five and a half sections on Howard's measure, 40,534 taxable acres on Chapman's table — and its first farmers worked at a distance from every institution: their first wheat was ground at a mill below Niles, Michigan, and their first mail was fetched from Edwardsville in Cass County, across the state line. The township they made was a corn-and-livestock order on drained marsh and prairie edge, with specialties the ground chose — peppermint in the muck, orchards from one settler's pocket of apple seeds, a dairy trade that built a creamery — and institutions the farmers built: a township Grange, a state Grange master from a section-32 farm, and in time the county machinery of institutes, insurance and Farm Bureau. The suburb took the township's west in the twentieth century's second half. What remains, measured at the end of this section, is an eastern farm belt and one 600-acre dairy operation that is now the largest single farm enterprise on the ground. This section carries the whole course at the record's strength: the county's numbers as a frame, the township's farms by name, and the silences of the record printed as silences.

The county frame is imported where a row directs it and labelled; Penn's own share is stated in each article. Two of these rows close only in part from open sources — the historical census series interiors — and those parts are printed as named gaps with their settlers inside the articles, never filled from memory. Nothing reopens this section's covered rows (corn-and-livestock, drainage, dairy, the fair, the market line) or its three in-file named gaps, which stand as the fragment carries them.