The story
Welcome to Marcellus Township
Marcellus Township, in the far northeast corner of Cass County, was the last part of the county to be settled and the last to be organized. Its settlers wanted to call it Cambria; the Legislature gave them Marcellus instead. It was a place of heavy timber, marshes and small lakes, where a pioneer woman once plowed and sowed eight acres of wheat by herself while her sons were away at war.
The land was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Chicago in 1821. For years afterward the settlers who poured into Cass County went around this township. Mathews explains why: dense forest and heavy timber, low marshy ground and its 'malaria,' a long haul to market, and speculators who held big tracts and would not sell except at steep prices. The first land entries were made on October 19, 1835, by Delevan Duncan and Joel Clark, but neither of them settled.
All three county histories name Joseph Haight of Orleans County, New York, as the first settler. He chose 139 acres on Section 18 in 1836, built a log cabin and moved his family into the middle of the forest that autumn. Frederick Goff, a carpenter, came in 1837 and built the township's first frame house near the lake that took his family's name. Joseph Bair came the same year. A noted hunter, he learned every section line in the township and located land for buyers who never came to see it. His wife Elizabeth was just as tough: during the Civil War, with all but one young son gone, she plowed, fitted and sowed eight acres of wheat herself.
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John Huyck and his sons followed an old path through the woods to land he had entered in 1836, and with his son Abijah he set out the first orchard in 1837, one hundred apple trees. Abijah Huyck later built a sawmill on Big Creek in 1862 and was counted the best shot in the county; Mathews says he killed between seventy-five and a hundred deer each fall for fifteen years. The first marriage, William Wolf to P. Goff, came in 1840, and William Bair was the first child born.
By 1843 the people felt ready to run their own affairs. Daniel G. Rouse circulated a petition asking the Legislature to set off a township named Cambria, but another Michigan township already had that name, and at the suggestion of Judge Littlejohn of Allegan it was christened Marcellus. The act was approved March 9, 1843, and the first township meeting was held at Rouse's house on June 16, 1843, when Rouse was elected supervisor. Mathews says about seventeen votes were cast; Rogers says eighteen.
Life stayed rugged. The township had no post office until about 1857, when Harrison Dykeman carried the mail to and from Lawton 'at least once a week' for whatever it paid, sometimes as much as 18 cents a week. A regular mail route from Decatur to Three Rivers began in 1860. The first schoolhouse went up about 1840 on Rouse's land, and Delia Huyck taught the first school there. The first sawmill, the Bair Mill, was built about 1844 on Section 24. Big Creek, which the map called Little Rocky River, turned several mills over the years.
The railroad changed everything. Rogers says the Peninsular Railroad crossed the township in the winter of 1870 and 1871, and that afterward no township in the county kept pace with its improvements. The village of Marcellus grew up at the center, and Wakelee was laid out in 1871 at the corner where Marcellus, Volinia, Newberg and Penn meet. By 1882 the township had nine school districts and 564 children of school age. The 2020 census counted 2,401 people in Marcellus Township, a figure that includes the village.
