The story
Welcome to Calvin Township
Calvin Township is one of the most remarkable rural communities in the Midwest. Quaker settlers who sheltered people escaping slavery drew free Black families here from the 1840s on, and by 1882 they made up a majority of the township, owning farms, holding township offices and building their own churches. Booker T. Washington came to see it for himself in 1903.
Calvin Township covers surveyed Township 7 South, Range 14 West, in the middle of southern Cass County. Like the rest of the county it was Potawatomi land until the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821. Rogers (1875) says it was named for Calvin Britain, a member of the Territorial Legislature when the township was organized. Britain was also the surveyor who ran the section lines in neighboring Penn in 1828. A chain of seven lakes crosses the middle of the township from east to west, and Christiann Creek runs through it on its way south to the St. Joseph River.
The histories disagree about who came first. Mathews (1882) and Glover (1906) both give the honor to Abner Tharp, who moved in from Jefferson Township in the spring of 1829, plowed ten acres and raised corn and potatoes, then moved back the next year. Rogers dates the first settlement to 1832, when Peter Shaffer, the widow White and her sons, Andrew Grubb and John Reid's family arrived. Shaffer's wife earned a place in the story on the way: when the rope broke while their heavy wagon was being hauled across the St. Mary's River, she plunged in shoulder deep and held it until the men came. The Territorial Legislature organized the township on March 17, 1835, with the first meeting at John Reed's house, and Pleasant Grubb was elected supervisor.
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Mills came early. Pleasant Grubb built a gristmill in 1831 at what became Brownsville, using millstones dug from the ground nearby, and later sold it to the Scottish brothers David and William Brown, who gave the hamlet its name. Rogers dates the mill to 1834 or 1835. A sawmill on Christiann Creek followed, then a distillery that sold whiskey at 25 cents a gallon. Josiah Osborn and his son Jefferson planted the first commercial nursery in the county in 1835, bringing four or five thousand seedlings from Indiana. The northeast corner became the East settlement in 1833, named for William East and his large family of Friends.
Those Quaker families, many of them active on the Underground Railroad, are the reason Calvin became what Mathews called 'a peculiar feature ... not to be found in any other township in the State.' Both Mathews and Glover say the first Black settler was a man named Lawson, who escaped slavery and came in 1836 with a Quaker preacher named Henry H. Way. In the mid-1840s free Black families from Logan County, Ohio, among them Harvey Wade, Nathaniel Boon, Turner and Crawford Byrd, Kitchen Artis and Harrison Ash, bought small farms. In 1849 the estate of Sampson Saunders, a Virginia planter who freed his slaves by his will and left $15,000 to buy them land in a free state, purchased farms here. Calvin's cheap land and friendly neighbors kept the stream coming.
By 1882 Mathews counted about 1,000 Black residents out of 1,693, and about 250 of the 400 voters. Black citizens served as justice of the peace and township clerk, and Mathews notes that more than half of the men liable for military duty went to war for the Union. A Grand Army post in Calvin was named for Matthew Artis. Three churches anchored the community: the Chain Lake Baptist Church, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, which Mathews calls 'the mother church of the county,' and Bethel A.M.E. Church, organized in 1856.
In 1903 Booker T. Washington visited and wrote about Calvin in The Outlook, in an article called 'Two Generations Under Freedom.' He described well-kept farms and a steam thresher owned by Henry L. Archer that threshed for Black and white farmers alike, and he admired the family plots and marble headstones of the Chain Lake churchyard. Glover reprinted his account in 1906. Geologists know the township for another reason: it holds the Calvin impact crater, a structure that a 1988 study argued was made by a meteorite impact. The 2020 census counted 1,993 people.
