The story
Welcome to Newberg Township
Newberg Township is the rough, hilly, lake-dotted corner in the northeast of Cass County, settled late because speculators held so much of its land. Its name is a deliberate misspelling, a pioneer once raced land sharks on foot to the land office, and the Air Line railroad later gave it the villages of Jones and Corey.
The first man to make a home here was John Bair, who entered land on section 34, on the north bank of the lake that bears his name, on October 16, 1832; Rogers says the family was already living there in 1831. His daughter Elizabeth remembered the journey from Ohio: as their wagon forded a deep stream it overturned, and her mother, holding the baby, would have drowned if her hair had not tangled in the wagon-cover bows and held her above the water until her father reached her. Bair knew every surveyed line in the woods. Once, when "land sharks" were heading for the Monroe land office to buy a tract a neighbor wanted for a home, Bair set out on foot straight through the forest, got there first, and politely told them they were a little too late.
Settlement was slow. Mathews explains that so much of the township's land was held by speculators that it was one of the last in the county with enough people to organize, and that before 1836 it remained nearly an unbroken wilderness. Daniel Driskel entered land on section 36 in 1833, and in 1835 George Poe came from Crawford County, Ohio, to section 22. The Michigan historical marker at Poe's Corners says he gathered 520 acres within two years, and his family's settlement became the Poe Neighborhood. Its burying ground received its first graves in May 1838, when Rachel and Betsey Eberhard died a week apart.
Read the full story
The name has two stories that fit together. Rogers and Mathews both say surveyor John C. Saxton named the township after a town in Ohio of which he had pleasant memories. Barker F. Rudd remembered that he and young Horace Nicholson were circulating the petition for a new township when Nicholson said, "we will spell it differently from other burgs," and so it became Newberg. The legislature erected the township on March 6, 1838, with its first meeting at John Bair's house. Nicholson did not live to see much of it. In 1838 he wounded a deer that swam across Lilly Lake, set out after it in a leaky old canoe, and sank halfway across while his parents watched from the shore; Rogers says only one leg, still in its boot, was ever recovered. His father, Spencer Nicholson, had platted a village called Newberg south of Lilly Lake in May 1837, ninety lots that never became more than a paper town.
Barker Rudd also built the first sawmill in the township, on a little stream on section 32, and the stream promptly dried up that fall. When Baldwin Jenkins of Pokagon came to admire it, he asked very seriously whether there had been any water there when Rudd built the mill. Anson Nicholson taught the first school, in a log cabin on section 32, in 1837. Hiram Harwood, a War of 1812 pensioner from Vermont, built his cabin on what became Corey Lake in January 1837, with Joshua Corey his only neighbor for three miles.
The township is hilly, with gravelly clay soil, stones and boulders, but it farmed well. In 1880 it had 188 farms averaging about 83 acres, 1,440 sheep and 447 acres of apple orchard, and its farmers had raised 64,228 bushels of wheat the year before. Churches grew at the crossroads: the First Regular Baptist Church of Newberg was organized on June 8, 1841, and built its church at Poe's Corners in 1858. A Methodist Protestant circuit was organized at the Corey Lake schoolhouse in 1869, and a Methodist Episcopal class formed at Poe's Corners in 1872.
The great change came with the Air Line railroad across the south tier of sections. Rogers wrote in 1875 that it gave the township new vigor; before it, farmers hauled their crops to Decatur, Three Rivers or Constantine. Three stops grew up: Corey, laid out on April 4, 1872, by Amanda Weatherwax on the county line; Dyer, a flag station named for J. M. Dyer, whose farm it served; and Jones, which became the township's main village and post office.
Newberg Township had 1,602 residents in 2020. Its hall is the old Poe's School of 1856 at Poe's Corners, which became the township hall in 1958 after the school districts merged, and the state historical marker beside it tells the Poe family's story.