The story
Welcome to Allen Township
Allen Township, on the Chicago road in western Hillsdale County, holds the county’s first settlement: Captain Moses Allen came to the prairie that bears his name in April 1827. Organized in 1835 as the whole western range of the county, it was cut down to one survey township by 1839, and the village of Allen stands on the old prairie.
By act of the Legislature of March 17, 1835, Allen was formed from the western quarter of the county, range 4 west; Litchfield and Reading were taken from it on March 11, 1837, and Camden on March 21, 1839, leaving Township 6 South, Range 4 West. Until 1835 the whole county had been the single township of Vance. Reynolds says the name perpetuates Captain Moses Allen, the first white settler of the town and county; the township’s records before 1845 were burned. In 1838 it had 353 people, two sawmills and one store.
A letter of 1878 quoted by Johnson says Moses Allen, formerly of New York, who had settled at Brownstown after the War of 1812, moved in April 1827 to the place that bears his name, ‘or the Indian name of ‘Macootah Siac,’ meaning ‘Sand Creek Prairie.’’ He brought the county’s first flock of sheep, and his death in October 1829 was the first death of a white person in the county. His widow built a ‘block’ tavern of whitewood logs on the Chicago road east of the present village; she later married Hiram Hunt, who kept it. Thomas Reed moved in about harvest time in 1829 and settled at the White Marble Springs, a mile and a half west of the village. The settlers pounded corn in a burned-out stump with a spring pole, said to have been fitted up by an Indian trader named Campau before any settlers came.
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Richard Corbus built the first frame house in 1835, and he and Thomas Reed set out the first orchards. The first schoolhouse, of logs, stood at the Allen settlement, where the Methodist Episcopal church was organized in 1833; the Baptist church was formed in 1841 and built in 1845 as a union church with the Wesleyan Methodists. Sand Creek, the outlet of Hog Lake in the southeast, flows northwest through the township east of the centre.
The main line of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway crosses the township from east to west, with a station a mile north of Allen village, which was a thriving hamlet before it was platted and recorded in 1868. The village of Allen lies on the prairie at the centre of the township. The 2020 census counted 1,334 people in Allen Township.