The story
Welcome to Sherwood Township
Sherwood Township, in the northwest corner of Branch County, took its name from Sherwood Forest at the suggestion of its first settler, Alexander E. Tomlinson of Nottingham, who reached the Dry Prairie settlement in 1832. It was organized in 1836, and the Michigan Air Line Railroad gave it the village of Sherwood after 1870.
Sherwood is surveyed Township 5 South, Range 8 West. The St. Joseph River flows nearly through its centre and the Nottawa crosses its far northwest corner. In March 1836 the north tier of the county, then Girard, was cut in half and the two western survey townships were set off as Sherwood; Union was divided from it on March 11, 1837. The first township meeting was held in 1836, and Hiram Doubleday, supervisor for many years, was the second or perhaps the first to hold that office.
The north tier of sections belongs to Dry Prairie, which runs into Athens Township in Calhoun County, where a group of settlers lived as early as 1832; the cholera struck that settlement in July 1832. Tomlinson, who left Sherwood Forest in the spring of 1832 and reached Dry Prairie that July, built the first log house in the township, and when the new township was being organized he proposed its name. Joseph Russell and William Minor came in 1834 and the Wests and Blossoms in 1835, and by 1839–40 the township was well filled; in October 1837 it had 217 people.
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The first road was the territorial road from Union City to Leonidas, which Collin says followed an old Indian trail; on it a settler named Watkins kept the ‘log tavern’ for eighteen years from 1835. John Onderdonk, the first settler south of the river, built the first frame house. Johnson tells of the Potawatomi Pam-ta-pee, who hid with his family in a Calhoun County swamp rather than go west at the removal.
The Air Line branch of the Michigan Central, which crosses the county diagonally through Sherwood, was opened from Jackson to Niles in 1870–71, and Collin calls it the foundation of the village of Sherwood. The village of Sherwood lies in the township. The 2020 census counted 1,959 people in Sherwood Township.