The story
Welcome to LaGrange Township
LaGrange Township grew up around a small open prairie that its first settler named for the Marquis de Lafayette's country home in France. Its pioneers wintered their cattle on tree bark, built a lake schooner miles from any harbor, and organized one of Cass County's four original townships. Today it holds most of the village of Cassopolis, the county seat.
The story begins in the spring of 1828, when Abraham Townsend, a seasoned frontiersman born in New York in 1771, made the first settlement in the township on the edge of the prairie that was long called Townsend's Prairie. Mathews says the family arrived on the 1st of March, in good season for maple sap, so their first work was boiling sugar, and the first building in the township was the rough shanty Townsend put up to shelter the kettles. Rogers records that Townsend named both the prairie and the township La Grange, after Lafayette's home in France. Neighbors came quickly, among them Thomas McKenney, whose name stuck to the northwest part of the prairie as McKenney's Prairie.
The Wright family arrived in October 1828 with five horses and twelve head of cattle and almost nothing to feed them. William R. Wright and his sons cut down hackberry trees, peeled away the rough outer bark and fed the soft inner layer, half an inch thick, to the starving stock, and the animals lived to see spring. Joy and grief came close together in those first years. David L. Wright, twenty-three, died on December 30, 1828, and was buried in the little burying ground on Isaac Shurte's farm. James Cavanaugh and Amy Townsend were married at her father's house in 1829, the township's first wedding. On August 31, 1829, during a summer storm, lightning struck the cabin of John Lybrook and killed his brother-in-law John Ritter, who had arrived with his family only a month before.
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The Territorial legislative council created La Grange on November 5, 1829, as one of the county's four original townships, taking in the present Wayne Township and the north half of Jefferson as well. Eighteen voters met at Isaac Shurte's house on April 5, 1830, and chose Joseph S. Barnard as the first supervisor. In the spring of 1832, Barnard surprised everyone: miles from navigable water, he built a fifteen-ton boat on La Grange Prairie, hauled it on a wagon behind oxen to the river and launched it, and its first trip to Chicago cleared about $250. The north half of Jefferson was set off in 1833 and Wayne in 1835.
Schooling and farming took root together. Mathews says the first school was taught in the summer of 1830 by Miss Arlantha Jane Brown in a cabin near the Townsend home. In 1831 the Townsends, Isaac Shurte and William R. Wright set out apple orchards. David Hain opened a blacksmith shop the year after he came, and Mathews credits him with making, in 1837, the first steel plow manufactured in the county. His brother John planted an orchard that same year whose apples made the township's first cider. In 1877 Dr. Alonzo Garwood began raising brook trout in spring-fed ponds on his farm two miles north of Cassopolis, with a hatching house that could bring on 100,000 eggs at once.
Not every settler was a quiet farmer. David Brady, a War of 1812 veteran who came in 1829, was a hard rider and great hunter whose hounds helped clear the county of wolves. Rough and unschooled, he was famous for kindness: in a year when corn was scarce he refused to sell to speculators and sold to needy neighbors at half price. Mathews says the eminent lawyers who came to court in Cassopolis made a habit of calling on him before they went home. He lived on his farm until 1878, dying at ninety-three.
Faith and burial grounds followed the farms. The Baptist church at Oak Grove, organized in 1843 under the splendid full name of "The Old School Regular Primitive Baptist Church of La Grange by the name of Concord," built its meeting house in 1848 opposite the Oak Grove schoolhouse, and in 1881 the building passed to the Christian Church. A Methodist Episcopal society was organized on November 10, 1858, at the house of Charles Van Riper. Besides the Shurte burying ground, Joseph McPherson laid out a burial place in the southwest corner on the Jefferson line. Its first grave was that of John F. Petticrew, a Revolutionary soldier who had served the whole seven years and died in 1837.
Some plans never grew. In 1837 John F. Petticrew platted a village called Mechanicsburg, sixteen lots on the north side of the road four and a half miles west of the courthouse, but only two or three buildings, a short-lived store and a small tannery ever stood there. The real town of the township became Cassopolis, the county seat, which sits mostly within LaGrange Township; the Air Line railroad depot there stood on land that pioneers Hiram Jewell and Abram Tietsort had farmed in the 1830s. Today the township has 3,787 people, a board that meets monthly at the township hall on M-62, and parts zoned to the Cassopolis and Dowagiac school districts.
