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Chapman (1880), Chapter X — papers of Dr. Jacob Hardman (pp. 512–514) and Thomas P. Bulla (pp. 514–517)
The township's old-settler stock was collected once, in print, in 1880. Chapman's tenth chapter gathers the county's reminiscence papers, and two of them are Clay Township's. Dr. Jacob Hardman's tells the building of the first hewn-log house with a shingle roof and brick chimney in the township and carries his claim to the county's first total-abstinence pledge (tested in the stories file). Thomas P. Bulla's tells the land itself: the white and black oak barrens of Clay and Harris "hardly worth buying from the Government," three or four crops exhausting the soil, until "land plaster and cultivation of clover" restored them — the judgment of a man who had farmed Section 31 since the 1830s, and the closest thing the township record has to a folk verdict on its own ground. The papers are the collected stock the checklist asks for: named tellers, a named collection, their best matter at telling size. Later collections for this ground were not reached; the stock's next keeper is the subject of the closing article.