The story
Welcome to Ontwa Township
Ontwa is the township in Cass County's southwest corner, on the Indiana line, where Beardsley's Prairie met Pleasant Lake. In 1829 it was a strip of nearly 156 square miles reaching across the county, and it was whittled down as township after township was carved from it. What remains holds the village of Edwardsburg, the old mill hamlet of Adamsville and a scatter of lakes.
This was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago, negotiated on August 29, 1821. Mathews (1882) and Glover (1906) both name Ezra Beardsley of Butler County, Ohio, as the first settler. Mathews tells how he crossed the township from the east, stopped where a lake met a broad prairie, plowed and sowed wheat, built a cabin and went back for his family, who arrived in the spring of 1826. For a year they were alone. On April 11, 1827, George and Sylvester Meacham, George Crawford and Chester Sage arrived with three yoke of oxen, a lumber wagon and a plow and built a cabin on the south bank of Pleasant Lake. Land-lookers who could not fit into Beardsley's tavern slept there, in the cabin everybody called "Bachelor's Hall."
Settlers came fast after the land sales of 1829. Mathews says squatters' claims were respected at the sales, and that one eastern newcomer who insisted on bidding on a settler's home at the White Pigeon sale was knocked to the floor after a single bid. Life on the open prairie was easier than in the woods, Mathews adds, and he could find no one who had gone hungry in Ontwa's early days. On July 4, 1829, the settlers held a picnic at Edwardsburg and found they had no flag. Mrs. Wilson Blackmar, who had arrived two days earlier, sewed one in an hour from a sheet and three bandanna handkerchiefs, two red and one blue, and William Bogart climbed a big tree on the shore of Pleasant Lake to lash the pole to a limb.
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Not every pioneer wanted company. F. Garver, a Virginian, lived in his cabin for nearly a month without a roof, waiting for the moon to reach the right sign so his shingles would not warp. When neighbors multiplied and a road was surveyed past his door, he sold his land in 1834 and moved to the deep woods of Indiana. At the township's east edge, on the creek, Sterling Adams platted Adamsport in March 1833, and Moses Sage laid out Christiana across the water. Sage's grist mill of 1835 ran night and day for several years. Glover (1906) quotes an old resident: "The Sages made the town."
The Territorial Council organized Ontwa by an act approved November 5, 1829, and ordered the first town meeting held at Ezra Beardsley's house. Rogers (1875) says the first election chose Beardsley as supervisor and Thomas H. Edwards as clerk. Porter Township was cut from Ontwa in 1833, and Howard in 1834, and the rest followed until Ontwa reached its present size. Rogers says the name came from a young Native woman called Ontwa who worked for Thomas H. Edwards. Mathews says she lived in the household of Abraham Edwards of Detroit.
Ontwa also has a place in the map of Michigan itself. Both Rogers and Mathews record that an observation taken on the bank of Pleasant Lake established a base for the survey of southwestern Michigan. Mathews counted twelve lakes in the township, six of them named: Pleasant, Spring, Cobert's, Garver's, Eagle and Christiana. Most of the land was a level sandy loam, easy to till, and by 1881 the township had ninety-two farms and 1,145 people.
Ontwa's farmers took a stand for sound money and temperance. During the years of worthless "wild-cat" bank notes, Mathews writes, local farmers organized to ship their own grain east and chose George Redfield as their agent, until the grain buyers agreed to pay in gold and silver. Redfield, a temperance man, also raised the frame of his house without liquor, the first building in the township raised "without stimulants." The schools grew from a class taught by Ann Wood in Wilson Blackmar's double log house in 1829 or 1830 to five districts with 407 children by 1881.
Today Ontwa is the busy south door of Cass County, with US 12 and M-62 meeting at Edwardsburg and Granger, Indiana, just over the line. The township hall stands on US 12, and the 2020 census counted 6,904 people, the village of Edwardsburg included.
