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Chapman (1880), p. 675; Howard (1907) I, p. 288 (the Lyon paper)
The first public men of Clay Township were a millwright and his fellow justice. Samuel Brooks settled in the township before 1833, worked as a practical millwright — with Burton Swearingen he contracted to build Jonas Harris's mill in 1836–'37 — and gave the township its first polling place: the first township election of 1840 was held in "Brooks' barn," on Section 30. When the township was organized, "the first justices of the peace of Clay township were Jonathan Hardy and Samuel Brooks." Nothing further of either man is in the record reached — no biography was taken for either — and they print at the size the record gives them: the men who held the township's first commissions, in the barn of one of them, three-quarters of a century before the town that would inherit their township had a name at all.