The story
Welcome to Volinia Township
Volinia Township took its name from a province of Poland and its character from two little prairies, Gard's Prairie and Little Prairie Ronde. Its farmers ran one of the best-known farmers' clubs in Michigan, its stagecoach village rose and faded, and Howard S. Rogers kept store here while he wrote the first history of Cass County.
The land was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Chicago in 1821. In October 1828 Elijah Goble, Jonathan Gard and James Toney, guided by Squire Thompson of Pokagon Prairie, came looking for farms. Goble took a liking to Little Prairie Ronde and staked his claim on October 16, 1828. The next spring the families began to arrive. An old settlers' meeting in 1869 agreed that Samuel Morris began the first cabin in the township, on Section 1, on March 27, 1829. Three days later Gard, Goble and Samuel Rich reached Gard's Prairie, and Gard pointed to a rise and said, 'there I will build a two-story sixty-foot barn.' Mathews says he lived to see it come true.
Pioneer life here produced some of the county's best stories. When George Newton and his sister Ann were building their house in 1832, Ann was left alone in the roofless cabin and a pack of wolves came howling around it. She climbed up on the logs, and the family dog drove the wolves off, badly torn but nursed back to health. Squire John Shaw, a justice of the peace, ruled on 'equity first and law technicalities afterward,' and once told two quarrelling lawyers that court had adjourned the moment they began insulting each other. Levi Lawrence, a blacksmith who had made musket parts at the Springfield armory, fetched millstones from Milwaukee for the township's first grist mill, built by Harry George about 1851, and the neighbors raised it without pay.
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The township was formed by an act approved March 29, 1833, and the first township meeting was held at the house of Josephus Gard. Gard had a liking for the Polish province of Volhynia and gave the township that name; over time the spelling settled into Volinia. For two years all of Van Buren County was attached to Volinia, and its men had to work off their road tax on the swamp where Lawton now stands. Marcellus was split off in 1843.
Little villages came and went. Charleston, on Little Prairie Ronde, was laid out in 1836, and the Kalamazoo to Niles stagecoach passed through daily. There Elijah Goble hung out the sign of the 'Brown Eagle' tavern in 1837 and kept it swinging for thirty years. At its opening dinner seventy-five people sat down to eat and twenty-two couples danced to a stray fiddler, a party Mathews calls the first pioneer picnic in Cass County. When the Michigan Central Railroad was finished, Charleston faded. Huycksville was laid out in 1836 with lots at $33 and later went back to farm fields. Nicholsville, named for the Nichols brothers who ran its mill and hotel, had about a hundred people in 1882.
Volinia's proudest institution was the Volinia Farmers' Club, organized in 1865. Its fair, first held in 1867, charged no admission and paid no prize money, only ribbons, yet at times it rivaled the county fair. The club held sheep-shearings, implement trials and an annual wheat meeting, and exposed grain buyers who cheated farmers with short weights. In 1874 it won the State Agricultural Society's $25 premium for the best township farmers' club in Michigan. Its secretary for most of those years was Howard S. Rogers, who kept a store at Volinia and there conceived his History of Cass County, published in 1875.
The township also had a Black farming community in its middle eastern part, noted by Mathews in 1882. Its members built the Volinia Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church on Section 36, and Rogers called it in 1875 the only meeting-house in the township. Rogers also praised the new town hall built that summer as 'an ornament and credit to the Township.' George Newton's Italianate house of 1865 still stands on Marcellus Highway inside the Fred Russ Experimental Forest, which was given to Michigan State University in 1942. The 2020 census counted 1,096 people in Volinia Township.
