The story
Welcome to Athens Township
Athens Township, in the southwest corner of Calhoun County, holds one of the earliest settlements in the county: seven pioneers took up Dry Prairie in June 1831. Organized in 1835, it was first to be called Berlin; the village of Athens grew on the Nottawa, and until 1840 a reservation of Potawatomi lay in the middle of the township.
Athens is surveyed Township 4 South, Range 8 West. The township was organized on March 17, 1835, with the first town meeting appointed at Lot Whitcomb’s house, where it met on April 6, 1835, Hiram Doubleday presiding; it then included the present Le Roy and Burlington, which were organized separately in 1837. The first name proposed, by Alfred Holcomb, was Berlin, but because Michigan already had a township of that name Athens was substituted.
About a sixth of the township was prairie, on the south side of the Nottawa, with heavy whitewood, black cherry and black walnut timber across the river and oak openings elsewhere. On June 3, 1831, a party of seven, among them Warren, Ambrose and Othorial Nichols and Benjamin F. Brown, who is credited with finding the prairie, came in and claimed nearly all of Dry Prairie; the Indians of the village they passed climbed onto Nichols’s wagon to look at the tinware, which they took for silver. In the summer of 1832 cholera struck the settlement, and Everts counts six dead in Athens; Gardner describes five new graves on the farm that now lies within the village of Athens.
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Lot Whitcomb, formerly postmaster in Sherwood Township across the Branch County line, brought the post office with him in 1836. A man named Farmer kept the first regular tavern early in 1836 at Branchville, a village that once stood about a mile east of Athens, and a store kept there by Underdonk about 1838 lived mainly on Indian trade. Isaac Crossett made a hand grist mill, ‘the coffee-mill,’ in the winter of 1831; the first sawmill was built in 1835, the first school was taught on section 34 in 1833, and the octagonal ‘Stone schoolhouse’ was put up in 1838. Lemuel Davis built the first bridge over the Nottawa near Athens village about 1845.
Everts writes that before 1840 many Indians lived on a reservation in the central part of the township; in that year they were taken west of the Mississippi, and six families escaped from the troops in Illinois and came back. The village of Athens lies in the township. The 2020 census counted 2,444 people in Athens Township.