The story
Welcome to Howard Township
The first farmers on Pokagon Prairie looked south at Howard's oak openings and decided the soil was too poor to plow. They expected to keep it as a free cattle range forever. Within ten years they had been proved wrong, and the 'barrens' filled with Yankee and Hoosier farm families who spent their first elections voting against each other.
The land of Howard Township was Potawatomi country, and the county histories record that the Indian title to this part of Michigan was given up by the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. The township lies in the southwest corner of Cass County, between Pokagon on the north and Milton on the south, with the city of Niles just over the line in Berrien County. Alfred Mathews, writing in 1882, explains why it was settled late: the early settlers chose the prairies and the heavy timber first, and passed over the oak openings in the belief that their soil was barren. Pokagon's pioneers counted on Howard staying empty, a range of tall 'barren grass' where their cattle could graze among the deer.
The first settler, as near as Mathews could learn, was William Kirk, a Virginian who had lived for a while near Niles. Out hunting for strayed cattle, he found a spring in Section 18 and, true to his Southern habit of building beside a spring whatever the distance from neighbors, moved his family there, by about 1826. He arrived a wealthy man by frontier standards, with $600, six yoke of oxen, ten cows and twenty hogs, but spent most of it entertaining every hunter and land-looker who came by. When the railroad arrived and the country grew too settled for his taste, he sold out and went on to Oregon, where he died in 1881 at the age of eighty-nine.
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Others followed in the early 1830s. Joseph Harter came from Preble County, Ohio, in 1830 and about 1833 or 1834 built a sawmill on a small stream on his farm, which Mathews calls the only water-powered mill the township ever had. The Kinsey brothers made the township's first brick. The Faries brothers ran a blacksmith and gun shop and made plows, which spared their neighbors the long ox-team trip to Bertrand. George Fosdick, a blacksmith, laid out a village of sixty-four lots called Howardsville in 1835 and made jail locks for nearly every jail in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana, but the village never grew and he moved away. Rogers places Howardsville on the north bank of Barron Lake and dates its plat to August 27, 1835.
Howard was set off as a township by the Territorial Legislature on March 7, 1834, and its first meeting was ordered held at the house of John Fosdick. The name has a romantic story behind it. Howard Rogers wrote in 1875 that Cass County's member of the Territorial Legislature, a man named Green from Niles, fell for a young Detroit woman named Howard and named the township for her. She jilted him, Rogers adds, but the township kept her name.
Early Howard was split between 'Yankees' from the East and 'Hoosiers' from the South, and for a while elections were fought on those lines instead of Whig and Democrat. The Hoosiers won at first and were soon outvoted. The ice broke, Mathews says, when William Weed married Squire Thompson's daughter and the anxious father asked the justice, 'Do you know anything about this 'ere man that is going to marry my gal?' That justice was Ezekiel C. Smith, who arrived in 1835, held the office for thirty-six years and married about four hundred couples. As supervisor in 1839 he got the township to pay a $20 bounty on every wolf, on top of the state's $20, and the wolves soon disappeared.
By 1880 Howard had 974 people on 152 farms, raising wheat, corn, oats and fruit, but no village and not even a post office. Barron Lake, once called Lake Alone because no other lake lay near it, had a summer hotel on its east bank and was the source of the Niles water supply, piped five miles underground. The only church was the Methodist society whose Coulter's Chapel stood on a lot given by James Coulter. Mathews dates the chapel to 1858; Rogers gives 1860. One farmhouse on the western line stood partly in Cass County and partly in Berrien, so that its family could change counties by crossing the room.
The township built its town hall, then called a 'Town House,' in 1883 for $775, and a historical marker now stands beside it on Barron Lake Road. The 2020 census counted 6,275 people in the township.