The story
Welcome to Penn Township
Penn Township was named by its Quaker settlers for William Penn, and it lived up to the name: its farms on Young's Prairie were among the busiest stops on the Underground Railroad in Michigan. It also holds two tales of things that did not last, the first gristmill in Cass County and Geneva, a village that was briefly the county seat and then vanished.
Penn Township lies in the center of Cass County, north of Calvin and between LaGrange and Newberg townships. The land was Potawatomi country until it was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Chicago of August 29, 1821. Surveyors ran the township lines in 1827, and Calvin Britain finished the section lines on July 22, 1828. At its heart is Young's Prairie, which got its name, Mathews tells us, from Nathan Young, the cook of the surveying party. From a rise his companions thought they saw a lake, but Young insisted the shimmering grass was a prairie, and he was right. Rogers spells the man 'Youngs' and calls him the party's 'slyper.'
Who settled first is an old argument. Mathews (1882) admits 'quite a conflict of statements' among the old residents. Rogers (1875) puts the first settlement on Young's Prairie in 1828 and says the earliest comers were squatters who sold out at the first chance. Joseph Frakes claimed he arrived in 1827 and found no settlers at all. The real tide came in 1829, when families including the Rineharts, the McIntoshes, Martin Shields and Stephen Bogue entered land. A great many of them were Friends from North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee by way of Ohio and Indiana, and Mathews says their hatred of slavery, more than anything else, was what brought them north.
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The Territorial Legislature created Penn on November 5, 1829, with the first meeting set for Martin Shields's house. At first Penn was huge, taking in what became Marcellus, Volinia, Newberg and the north halves of Porter and Calvin. The records show no election until 1831, when John Agard was chosen supervisor and the township raised $75 for expenses. Shields, a saddler, was also the first postmaster. Mathews tells how he once called a meeting to preach, then could not find his text, and that was the end of his ministry.
The first gristmill in Cass County, as both Rogers and Mathews state, was built in 1828 by David Carpenter. He first put it on Donnel's Lake, found the water would not rise into his flume, tore it down and rebuilt it on Christiann Creek just below the later site of Vandalia. Water ran through a hollow sycamore log to the wheel, and the little mill ground forty bushels of corn a day for settlers up to forty miles away. Pioneer life had its trials: Daniel McIntosh lost his way hunting runaway horses in the winter of 1829, froze his feet so badly that part of one foot was removed with a carving knife, and spent the rest of his life working the farm on his hands and knees.
In 1830 commissioners chose Geneva, on the north shore of Diamond Lake, as the county seat. Dr. Henry H. Fowler, the township's first physician, was its chief promoter and named it, Rogers says, for Geneva in New York. It had a store, a blacksmith and Nathan Baker's plow foundry, the first furnace in the county. A second set of commissioners moved the seat to Cassopolis the next year, and Geneva faded away. Glover (1906) says the site was by then known as Shore Acres.
The Quaker families made Penn a center of antislavery work. Young's Prairie had a Friends' monthly meeting by 1841, and an Anti-Slavery Society of Friends was formed there on October 11, 1845. When Kentucky slave hunters raided Quaker farms in August 1847, Penn men were among those who stopped them. Two railroads followed later: the Air Line through Vandalia and the Grand Trunk, beside which Isaac P. James platted Jamestown on November 12, 1869. The post office would not accept that name, so the hamlet became Penn. James E. Bonine, a large Quaker landowner, kept an elk and deer park on his farm and, Mathews says, sold seven elk to the King of Italy.
Today the township governs the village of Vandalia and a share of Cassopolis. The 2020 census counted 1,755 people.
