The story
Welcome to Wayne Township
Wayne Township, on Cass County's northern border, was named for General Anthony Wayne by a settler who admired him. Its settlers fought a great swamp to get their wheat to market, a would-be city called Venice existed only on paper, and a boy who spent part of his childhood here later ran for President.
The land was Potawatomi country, ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Chicago in 1821. A ridge of hills runs across Wayne from southwest to northeast, with rolling upland to the east and, to the west, part of the long, low 'Dowagiac swamp' along the North Branch of Dowagiac Creek. In June 1853 a freshet washed out a mill dam on William Griffis's land and undermined an old tree, and under its roots lay the bones of a mastodon: a jawbone about four feet long, a tooth weighing some four pounds, part of a tusk and a rib.
Josiah Johnson made the first land entry, on Section 35, on June 22, 1831. Mathews says the first settlements came in 1833, with the brothers Joel C. and Elijah W. Wright on Section 24 probably first, and Jacob Zimmerman, Cornelius Higgins and Frederick Hurtle close behind. Abram Weaver came in 1834 and settled on Section 1. His young son, James B. Weaver, later became the Greenback Party's candidate for President in 1880 and the People's Party candidate in 1892.
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The township was part of La Grange until an act approved March 17, 1835, set it off on its own. The name, the histories agree, was suggested by Cornelius Higgins, an admirer of Major General Anthony Wayne, and Higgins became the first supervisor. The first township meeting was held in April 1835 at a Wright family house. In 1836 the assessment roll held just twenty-four taxpayers.
Getting crops to market was the great struggle. St. Joseph was the shipping point, and the direct road ran across the swamp, which settlers thought could not be crossed. After two failed tries, a road was surveyed in the spring of 1837 under the direction of John Barney of Silver Creek. The settlers built a causeway and bridged the creek, high water wrecked it the next spring, and that summer they rebuilt it. Sickness was another enemy. In the fall of 1838 nearly every family was down with fever, and Philo B. White, unable to find anyone well enough to help with the harvest, had to set fire to his own field of oats.
Schools started early. The Higgins Schoolhouse, of logs with an open fireplace and slab benches, was built by settlers from both Wayne and Volinia, and George Newton of Volinia was its first teacher. Later John S. Gage taught in an old cooper shop and was paid not in money but in labor, as his patrons worked off their school tax breaking about ten acres of his land. Gage went on to own a thousand acres and to patent a roller grain drill in the early 1860s. The Methodists formed a class about 1839, and the Wayne Chapel of 1872, with a spire and bell, cost $2,400. The North Wayne Methodist church followed in 1861, and Glenwood organized a Church of Christ in 1874.
Some plans were bigger than the results. In August 1836 Orlando Crane laid out Venice, a 'paper town' of 538 lots and two public squares in the southwest corner of the township; the city of Dowagiac later grew there instead. On the Michigan Central, a sidetrack called Tietsort's became a station, a sawmill rose in 1855, and a post office named Model City opened. In 1874 the place was platted as Glenwood. Nearby, George May began a railroad with wooden rails to haul logs to a sawmill and ran out of money after about two miles.
Farms grew large. Ransom Dopp, once a stagecoach driver, built up 1,400 acres, which Mathews in 1882 called the largest farm in the county. Today the township hall stands on Glenwood Road, and the 2020 census counted 2,576 people in Wayne Township.
