The story
Welcome to Buchanan Township
Buchanan Township wraps around the city of Buchanan, with rolling farms, a scatter of small lakes and high bluffs over the St. Joseph River. Moccasin Bluff, the highest point, overlooks the site of a Potawatomi village the first settlers knew, and Fernwood Botanical Garden now spreads along the river in the northeast corner.
Buchanan is surveyed Township 7 South, Range 18 West. When it was organized it took in only the part of the township west of the St. Joseph River; Coolidge (1906) says about four of its thirty-six sections lie east of the river. It is bounded by Oronoko to the north, Niles to the east, Bertrand to the south and Weesaw to the west. Ellis (1880) describes undulating clay-loam farmland, McCoy’s Creek running northeast to the river through the village of Buchanan, the headwaters of Hickory Creek and the Galien River’s north branch, and lakes named Clear, Round, Yellow, Wagner, Weaver, Madron, Moon, Coveney’s and Juday.
The greater part of the township lay in the land west of the river ceded at the Carey Mission treaty of September 20, 1828, but the site of the village was within the Potawatomi reservation, ceded in 1833. Ellis writes that the banks of the St. Joseph here were favorite homes of the Potawatomi, ‘for here were their homes and the graves of their fathers.’ When the first settlers came in 1833 and 1834 there were two villages: Moccasin’s village on the flat below Moccasin Bluff, named for its leader, and Mish-a-qua-ka south of the present city, which Fox (1924) says held twenty-five families. The Moccasin Bluff site is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Charles Cowles of Vermont is named as the first settler; in June 1833 he cleared land and built a cabin where the city of Buchanan now stands, and soon a shingle mill on McCoy’s Creek, which Fox (p. 30) says is named for the missionary the Rev. Isaac McCoy. Russell McCoy cleared a claim at its mouth in 1833 and built a cabin with Hiram Wray in 1834; Ellis says the Potawatomi at first tore the cabin down but soon accepted it. Many claims on the best land along the creek were lost when the commissioners chose those tracts as seminary land and priced them at $20 an acre. John Weaver, the Dragoo, Coveney, Colvin, Juday and Boil families and Darius Jennings, a former river captain who settled at the foot of Moccasin Bluff, filled in the township in the mid-1830s.
The township was erected by an act approved March 11, 1837, and named for James Buchanan, later President, who Fox (1924) says was then ‘very prominent in the political world at Washington.’ The first township meeting, on April 3, 1837, at Dr. Charles C. Wallin’s house near the mouth of McCoy’s Creek, drew fifteen votes, and Wallin was elected supervisor. Ellis counted 204 people in 1840 and 2,880 in 1874. John Hamilton and Andrew C. Day built a gristmill in 1839, and Hamilton laid out the village plat, recorded in 1842. The village was incorporated in 1858, according to Ellis and Coolidge, and grew into the manufacturing town that is now the city of Buchanan, governed separately from the township.
Outside the town the township stayed rural. About 1856 Russell McCoy and partners built a steam sawmill on Clear Lake. Joseph Coveney, an Irish immigrant who settled on section 5 in 1836, built up about 600 acres, and by 1906 his sons had the largest peach orchards in the township. Fernwood Botanical Garden, begun as Kay and Walter Boydston’s home in 1941 and opened to the public in 1964, occupies 105 acres on the river’s east bank. The 2020 census counted 3,436 people in Buchanan Township.