The story
Welcome to Galien Township
Galien Township lies on the Indiana line, where three branches of the Galien River rise in what pioneers called the “Galien woods.” Settlers came slowly to its heavy timber, but by the 1870s its mills were turning out more than a million broom handles a year. Part of the township even drains south toward the Mississippi.
Galien Township is a fractional township of eighteen full sections and the north halves of six more on the Indiana state line, in surveyed Town 8 South, Range 19 West. The land west of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the Potawatomi in a treaty made at the Carey Mission in September 1828. The headwaters of the Galien River rise here and flow north, and the township takes its name from the river. Wikipedia, citing Walter Romig’s Michigan Place Names, says the river was named for René Bréhant de Galinée, the French missionary and mapmaker, and that the name was changed to Galien by legislative action in 1829. Part of the southeast of the township drains to the Kankakee and so to the Mississippi.
Austin N. Hungerford, who wrote the Galien chapter in Franklin Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880), describes heavy forests of beech and maple, black walnut, whitewood and ash, “known far and near as the ‘Galien woods.’” Much of the land was bought for its timber by mill owners in other townships before any farmers came. The earliest settlers he could trace were John P. Johnson, who came in 1834, Samuel Garwood, who settled on Section 11 before 1836, and James H. Wilson, a Virginian who came in 1836 and built the first sawmill in the township on his own creek in 1837.
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The territory was attached to Bertrand Township in 1836 and to Weesaw in 1837. An act approved February 29, 1844, set it off as Galien, with the first meeting at the house of James Edson, who had settled on Section 13 in 1836. Thirty-one votes were cast, and William Burns was elected supervisor, Daniel Bollinger clerk and Samuel Garwood treasurer. The new township was frugal: in April 1846, Ellis reports, it voted “That $22 of wild-cat money be sold to the highest bidder” to buy a book for the treasurer, and the money brought 50 cents.
Settlement picked up after 1845. The four Spicer brothers came from Ohio about 1847, George Partridge from New Hampshire in 1849, and William Valentine of New York, who built a mill in the southwest corner. Ellis gives the population as 141 in 1845, 404 in 1854, 528 in 1860 and 856 in 1870. Alvin Emery built an early mill on Soper Creek, and Samuel Seleigh built another on Section 16 that was known by 1880 as the Penyard Mill.
The first steam sawmill went up about 1851 at the site of the present village of Galien. George A. Blakeslee bought it in 1853, laid out the village plat in 1861, and saw the village incorporated in 1879. When the mill burned in 1868 it was rebuilt in seventy days, and by 1880 it was turning out 1,500,000 broom handles a year, while Richard W. Montross’s Wolverine Handle Factory shipped every kind of handle as far as Europe and Australia. Blakeslee was also a leader of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which met in Blakeslee Hall over his store.
Ellis lists a German Lutheran church organized in the village schoolhouse in 1866, a Methodist class of 1871, a United Brethren society, and a Church of the Disciples organized at Galien Centre in 1859, which built a church on the southwest corner of Section 10 about 1869. Coolidge (1906) describes the village at the crossing of the Michigan Central and the “Vandalia” railroads. U.S. Route 12 now crosses the north of the township. The 2020 census counted 1,412 people in Galien Township.