The story
Welcome to Girard Township
Girard Township, north of Coldwater, was organized in 1834 and was then the whole north tier of the county. Its prairie, which Collin thought the floor of an ancient lake, drew Richard W. Corbus in 1829 and James B. Tompkins, the surveyor of Coldwater, in 1831, and the Marshall road through it became the route north to Calhoun County.
Girard is surveyed Township 5 South, Range 6 West. By a law of March 7, 1834, the north tier of survey townships, 5 south in ranges 5 to 8 west, was made a township named Girard; Sherwood was cut off in 1836 and Butler in 1838. The petitioners asked for the name Fairfield, but Lenawee County had taken it, so their representative suggested Girard, which Johnson says was no doubt from the Philadelphia millionaire. The first township meeting was held on April 7, 1834, in a schoolhouse in the present village of Girard.
The Corbus family were Girard’s first and best-known pioneers. Richard W. Corbus came to Girard prairie in 1829 where an Indian village then stood; the Corbuses made their first home in one of its houses not then in use. Richard stayed until 1831, and his brother Joseph C. Corbus carried on. James B. Tompkins settled on sections 15 and 22 in July 1831, partly on the ground of the present village, and became the first supervisor; William McCarty, the first sheriff of the county, settled on section 15 the same year. Aura Smith opened the first stock of goods in 1837. On the ‘west prairie’ Henry Van Hyning, Martin Barnhart, John Parkinson, the first postmaster in that part of the county, Benjamin H. Smith, the Craigs and the Aldriches settled between 1830 and 1833.
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The Marshall road, established in the summer of 1831, bisects the township north and south through Girard village and meets the Chicago road at Coldwater. In October 1837 Girard, then including Butler, had 448 people. Collin wrote in 1906 that Girard had always kept its importance as an agricultural centre and was one of the first townships to have a grange.
The hamlet of Girard stands at the centre of the prairie, and the Hodunk mill site lies on its western edge at the Union line. The 2020 census counted 1,770 people in Girard Township.