The story
Welcome to Bronson Township
Bronson Township, in the western tier of Branch County, holds the county’s first settlement: Jabe Bronson’s log tavern of 1828 on the burr-oak plain along the Chicago road. First organized in 1832–33 as Prairie River, it took his name in 1837, and the city of Bronson stands on his prairie.
Bronson is surveyed Township 7 South, Range 8 West, and is a small part of the original township. An act of June 29, 1832, effective March 1, 1833, made the western half of the county a township called Prairie River, after the stream the settlers called Hog Creek; Wales Adams had told the mapmaker John Farmer to call it Prairie River so as not to confuse it with the Hog Creek in Girard. A law of April 23, 1833, renamed it Green, but it went on being called Prairie River until the act of March 11, 1837, renamed both the township and its village, York, Bronson. Matteson was set off in 1838 and Noble in 1845.
Jabe Bronson, a Connecticut shipwright, settled on the burr-oak plain in the northeast quarter of the township in 1828, the first permanent settlement in Branch County, and made his log house a tavern; a post office was opened in it in 1829. By September 1830 six families lived on Bronson’s Prairie, among them Seth Dunham and Jeremiah Tillotson, the first supervisor of Prairie River. David and Alonzo Waterman opened the first store in 1833 and platted the village as York.
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In 1830 Wales Adams and Willard Pierce agreed to build a sawmill where the Chicago trail crossed Prairie River, in the northwest corner of section 29; it was running in July 1831. A man named Judson kept a tavern there, where Bishop Philander Chase stopped in 1832 and heard of the lake he named Gilead, and the Prairie River post office was opened at the Judson House in 1832. Another sawmill was built on Swan Creek in section 17, and the first grist mill in the township was ready in 1839. In October 1837 Bronson, then including Matteson and Noble, had 635 people.
The Michigan Southern Railroad reached the county line by the middle of February 1851, giving Bronson a railroad; Johnson says the township grew steadily from then on. The city of Bronson lies at the centre of the old prairie. The 2020 census counted 1,288 people in Bronson Township, outside the city.
