The story
Welcome to Clarendon Township
Clarendon Township, in southern Calhoun County, was part of Homer until 1838, when it was organized and named, probably because so many of its settlers came from Clarendon in Orleans County, New York. Anthony Doolittle settled on Cook’s prairie in May 1832; the rest of the township was heavy maple forest.
Clarendon is surveyed Township 4 South, Range 5 West. It was organized as part of Homer in 1834 and as a separate township in 1838, when, Everts says, the name was probably given because many settlers were from Clarendon, Orleans County, New York; Gardner repeats the explanation. It is watered by the St. Joseph, and Homer Lake lies partly within it.
Except for Cook’s prairie in the northeast and a few other places, the township was thick forest with abundant sugar maple, and for years some families used no sugar but their own maple. The first settler was Anthony Doolittle, who came in May 1832 with Deacon Henry Cook, who settled in Eckford; Doolittle took land on section 1 on what was afterwards called Cook’s prairie. Oliver Lynch built a shanty on the prairie early in 1833, and Timothy Hamlin, who came late in 1832 or early in 1833, married Doolittle’s daughter, the first marriage in the township, and taught school in 1833 in a log schoolhouse on the prairie.
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The first road was the Jackson and White Pigeon territorial road, laid out as early as 1830 and the main route for people coming into the country. Many settlers came in 1835–37, among them Elijah Andrus from Clarendon, New York, in 1836. The Presbyterian church later at Tekonsha was first organized in Clarendon, with a log church on section 18.
The township voted ten thousand dollars toward the Air Line division of the Michigan Central, on a second vote in 1869, and the line opened in the fall of 1870 with a station two miles north of Clarendon Centre. Everts called Clarendon strictly an agricultural township. The 2020 census counted 1,181 people in Clarendon Township.