The farm township at the record's full length, 1875–1907

1875 atlas directory (p. 91); Chapman (1880), Ch. X; Howard (1907) I, p. 288

What the township was, in its own record, on the eve of the town. The 1875 directory's Clay Township roll is a farmers' roll with the university's faculty interleaved — Webster on Section 23, Cripe and McCombs on Section 26, Jacob Eaton on Section 13, Stover on Section 28, the Chirharts and Stuckeys on Section 30, Chalfant on Section 31, Mary Ann Siders as owner of the mill — and every post office on it is South Bend, Notre Dame, Bertrand or Mishawaka: there was no Clay Township post office in 1875, and none is recorded by 1907. The ground they farmed had a reputation to overcome: Thomas P. Bulla's reminiscence paper in Chapman recalls that "the white and black oak barrens of Clay and Harris townships were hardly worth buying from the Government; that three or four crops would exhaust the soil," until "land plaster and cultivation of clover" restored them — Howard's own verdict is kinder: soil "chiefly sand and gravel," crops "more uniform from year to year than on stronger soils, failures being very rare," workable "from March to December," with corn, vegetables and fruit most successful. The 1838–39 township also produced the county's temperance first, in Dr. Jacob Hardman's reminiscence: he "erected the first hewn log house, shingle roof and brick chimney in Clay township" on his quarter section, and "I wrote the first total abstinence pledge in St. Joseph county; this was about the year 1839" — printed as what it is, a pioneer's own claim in a collected reminiscence, and carried to the claims record below. Howard's one township figure closes the era: "According to the United States census for 1900, the population of Clay township, including that of Notre Dame and St. Mary's, was one thousand, one hundred and fifty." A farm township of some eleven hundred souls, two rail lines running south to north through it (the Michigan Central and the interurban, per Howard), a mill ruin on its river section, and no village at all — Chapman had said it plainly in 1880: of mills and villages in Clay township there was "but one of the former, and none of the latter. But villages in Clay township are not necessary, as it is conveniently and closely situated to South Bend."