The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1875 atlas, Clay Township footnote; Howard (1907) I, p. 284; Chapman (1880), pp. 675–681
The township filled from the river eastward, and the atlas footnote is its roll. Benjamin Potter came before 1829, on Section 24; John Hague came in July 1829, and William McCombs the same month, on Section 26; John and Peter Cripe settled the same section in 1830, and Thomas Longley Section 21 the same year; Peter and Jacob Eaton took Section 13 in 1831, and Evan Chalfant Section 31; William Smith was on Section 14, John H. Smith — "some say was the oldest settler" — and Joshua Johnson came about 1831; John C. Stutsman took Section 24 in 1832, Evan and Thomas B. Chalfant Section 31 the same year, and Gideon Drapier Section 31 in 1832; James Stuckey was on Section 30, Samuel Brooks in the township before 1833, Francis Jennings and his three sons in 1833 or 1834; Joseph and Stephen Ulery took Sections 24 and 35 in 1834, and Menzo Webster Section 23 the same year; Oliver P. Stuckey followed on Section 19 in 1836, David Sossaman on Section 19 in 1841 and Jacob Chirhart on Section 30 in 1845. Howard's settler list agrees in substance and adds the names the footnote spreads across its lines. The settlements were river settlements first — Chapman: the first were "along the east bank of the St. Joseph, where John Eyler, Lambert McCombs and John Weaver, a German Baptist preacher, together with a few other families, located" — and the ground east of the river "did not settle very rapidly until about 1837–'8." The southern tier of sections — 23, 24, 26 and their neighbours — is the tier the town would later be cut from, and its first holders are the town's founding generation at one remove: Webster on the townsite itself, the Ulerys and Potter and Stutsman on the section east of it, the McCombses and Cripes on the next.