The story
Welcome to Royalton Township
Royalton Township lies in a bend of the St. Joseph River south of St. Joseph, a small township of vineyards, berry fields and orchards. Pioneers here went thirty-eight miles to Prairie Ronde to have their grain ground, and travelers between St. Joseph and Berrien Springs stopped at the Buckhorn tavern, whose name survives on the map.
Royalton is a fractional township of about nineteen sections in Town 5 South, Range 18 West, bounded on the north and east by the St. Joseph River. Its land was part of the tract west of the river ceded by the Potawatomi in the Carey Mission treaty of September 20, 1828 (Ellis 1880, p. 37). Royalton was set off from St. Joseph Township in 1835, with David M. Drum as supervisor, and at first included what are now Lincoln and Sodus townships. Sodus went with Pipestone in 1842, and Lincoln was detached in 1867 or 1868 (Ellis gives 1868 on p. 308 but 1867 in his Lincoln chapter, p. 257; Coolidge gives 1868 on p. 259 and 1867 on p. 262). Ellis (p. 308) says the township records from 1835 to 1852 were destroyed by fire.
The first settler was John Pike of North Carolina, who moved down from Wolf’s Prairie in 1832 and entered land in the northwest corner near the river. His son William, who had carried the chain for Lucius Lyon’s survey crew, told Ellis about the deep snow of 1831 and about the day he carried fifteen two-bushel bags of flour, one at a time, across the breaking ice at Berrien Springs. Jehial Enos, who had been cook and packer for the same survey in 1829, settled next to Pike in 1832.
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David Shearer, a North Carolinian by way of Ohio, came in the fall of 1834 with a wife and thirteen children in four two-horse wagons. They cut a road from the St. Joseph road to Section 19 and camped beside a fallen tree until their cabin was built. Rowland Tryon and his son William came on foot from Indiana the same fall, and Ellis tells how the elder Tryon stood at the Kalamazoo land-office door at daybreak to beat another man to the 80 acres he wanted on Section 29. William H. Tryon became a famous hunter: in one forty-day hunt, he said, he took thirty-seven deer, sixteen raccoons, six wild turkeys and nine swarms of bees. Robert Hollywood, an Irish-born lake sailor who had commanded the steamboat Davy Crockett on the St. Joseph, bought David Ball’s farm in 1839 and lived there until his death in 1851.
The St. Joseph road crossed the township, and near the bridge over Buckhorn Creek stood a log tavern kept first by Clark Pennell and his father. Ellis says it was ‘a shabby concern’ but busy, and that it was called the Buckhorn for the pair of buck’s horns William Tryon nailed over its shed. Settlement was slow: Ellis (p. 307) gives a population of 246 in 1840 and 284 in 1845, counting what is now Lincoln. Alanson Risley, who came in 1846, worked two days at fifty cents a day to pay for each tree in his orchard.
German families came after 1850. Henry Ashoff, born in Westphalia, organized the Emanuel class of the Evangelical Association in 1860, and its church on his farm held services and Sunday school in German. A Methodist church followed in 1866 and a Christian church in 1878. The Fruit Grange, organized in 1873, built a hall at Tryon’s Corners, where a post office reopened in 1874. By 1906 Coolidge described an interurban line running about six miles through orchards and vineyards from Arden near the southeast corner, said the township stood next to St. Joseph in grapes, and noted that John Bort had been the first to grow strawberries on a large scale. That spring voters set aside $30,000 for macadam roads. The 2020 census counted 5,141 people in Royalton Township.