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1828–1860 · THE CLEARING GENERATION
The first farming of Penn Township was subsistence at the edge of someone else's market: the Moats on section 17 from 1828, the roll of first settlers the People leg carries whole — Holt, Skinner, Cottrell, Curtis, the Byrkits, the Irelands — taking up the prairie edges and the timber in the order the ground allowed, wheat the first cash-and-bread crop, ground first below Niles until the county's own mills rose (the St. Joseph Iron Company's country and South Bend's first mills are the county's story; the Baugo seat of 1831–32, in Businesses, is this township's). The named neighborhoods of the settlement — Pleasant Valley and Willow Creek on the river, Moat's Prairie on the south side, the later Eberhart Farm — were farm neighborhoods, their names field names before they were anything else (the Story of Osceola section carries them). What the sketches add, farm by farm, is the clearing order: land entered in parcels, timber burned or milled, the great holdings assembled across a generation — John McKnight entering about 600 acres and raising eight children in a one-room log cabin (Chapman, pp. 827–828) — until by Chapman's publication the township's map was, like the 1875 atlas prints it, a wholly private farm map: section lines and owners' names, the village a small interruption at the creek mouth.
The orchard line begins with one man's pocket: Edmund Byrkit came to the county in 1830, "selected a location, planted apple seeds, went back and brought the family the following year" — the township's orchards descend, on his son's sketch, from those seeds (Chapman, pp. 805–806). George V. Byrkit, born on the ground in 1837, farmed section 14 on 216 acres. The entry prints at its strength: a biographical sketch's family telling, uncorroborated by any orchard record — the county horticultural society whose history Howard's farmers chapter carries (vol. 1, ch. VII, §3) is the settler named in the closing roll for the orchard course at institution strength. Small fruit and the orchard trade beyond the Byrkit telling are not in the record reached, and print as the roll's gap, not as a paragraph built on the pattern of other counties.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), p. 789 (conditions), pp. 805–806 (the Byrkits), pp. 827–828 (McKnight) — as carried whole in this build's People leg.