The story
Welcome to Adams Township
Adams Township, in eastern Hillsdale County, was formed from Moscow in 1836 and at first took in the whole range south of it. Salmon Sharp of Auburn, New York, made the first settlement in 1835, and the village of North Adams grew up as a station on the Detroit, Hillsdale and Southwestern Railway.
By act of the Legislature of March 23, 1836, Adams was formed from Moscow and included all of range 2 west in Hillsdale County south of that township; Jefferson, Ransom and the eastern half of Amboy were later formed from its territory. The first town meeting was held on April 4, 1836, Reynolds says, in the woods on section 16, a large log serving as table and desk. By April 1838 only 120 acres of government land were left unsold, and the township had 279 people.
The first settler was Salmon Sharp, who came with his son Norman S. Sharp from Auburn, Cayuga County, New York, in the spring of 1835, chose his land that April and walked to the land office at Monroe to enter it. While he went back for his family, his son and Samuel Healey kept ‘bachelors’ hall’ in the log house the Sharps had built, ten logs high and eighteen by twenty-four feet, the first in the township for a white family. Sharp’s rope and team were in demand at every house raising. William Cutler settled at what became North Adams about June 1836, and the Footes the same year; Milton Foote, a Methodist minister, preached the first sermon in the township at his house.
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The oldest post office in the area was called Adams and was first kept by Salmon Sharp at his house on the north line of the township, the mail being carried from Adrian to Jonesville by way of Addison by his brother Sheldon. The largest lake is Lake Adams, on sections 21 and 28.
Johnson wrote in 1879 that North Adams, in the northeast part, was the only village in the township and a station on the Detroit, Hillsdale and Southwestern Railway, formerly the Detroit, Hillsdale and Indiana. Reynolds notes the weekly North Adams Advocate, published from 1895. The 2020 census counted 2,262 people in Adams Township, the village of North Adams included.