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South Bend News-Times, 29 July 1922; Howard (1907); census orchard tables, 2007–2022
Each specialty the county is known for was tested against Clay Township, and the township's answers are mostly no. Mint: the county grew it — the News-Times of 29 July 1922 reported St. Joseph County helping "to furnish the world's supply" of peppermint, black mint the most grown, on the Kankakee muck of the county's south; no Clay Township mint carrier was found, and the federal bulletins' 1835 start-date for the industry belongs to St. Joseph County, Michigan — a same-name trap, discarded whole. Muck and truck farming: the muck is the Kankakee valley's, in the southern county; no Clay-framed muck or truck carrier was found — a named truck farm of the era prints "partly within and partly out of" the South Bend limits with its township unverified, and is not claimed for Clay. Dairy: negative outright — no creamery, cheese factory or condensery ever stood in Clay Township in the carriers searched; the Schlosser Brothers receiving stations of the county's dairy story stood at Walkerton and North Liberty, in those towns' files. Orchards: county frame only — 13 farms and 63 acres in 2007, 9 and 26 in 2012, 13 and 21 in 2017, 13 and 27 in 2022 — small and shrinking, with no township split the volumes give. The pattern across the five tests is the finding: Clay Township's farming was the general farming of the frame article — wheat, corn, garden ground — and the county's specialty lines ran elsewhere in the county.