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Chapman (1880), the township chapters; Howard (1907), Chapter VIII
Clay Township was formed 5 May 1840, in Howard's words, when "the commissioners divided the original Portage township into Center and Union townships, and at the same time established German, Clay and Warren townships." Its bounds as Howard prints them, and "as they have since remained": "north by the State of Michigan, east by a line running north and south through the middle of Range 3 east, south by the south line of Township 38 north and west by the St. Joseph river." The township is composite: its western part, in Range 2 East, "constituted the original German township as attached by the order of May 5, 1840," and its eastern part was taken from Harris and Penn townships, with a further adjustment of 7 December 1842 adding the east halves of sections 9, 16, 21, 28 and 33 of Township 38, Range 3 East. It was named for Henry Clay of Kentucky. The county's thirteen civil townships descend from three originals — Penn, Portage and Olive, formed 6 May 1832.
The first settlements in the township were river settlements, made a decade before the township existed: in 1829 Benjamin Potter, John Hague and William McCombs settled near the river (the 1875 county atlas carries Potter's coming as "1829; some say he came the preceding year"), joined in 1830 by John and Peter Cripe and Thomas Longley and in 1831 by Peter and Jacob Eaton. Howard describes the township's soil as "chiefly sand and gravel, and though not remarkably fertile at first, is easily worked" — the gravel-plain ground the land fragment takes up. The township that Roseland would be carved from was, by 1907, already a campus township: Howard records no church in Clay Township except at Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, the German Baptists having met in the western part since 1868 — no congregation stood at the future townsite when the county history was written, a fact the Religion section carries as its starting negative.