The story
Welcome to Fayette Township
Fayette Township, around Jonesville, was organized in 1835 as the whole central range of Hillsdale County and later gave up five townships. Its first settler, Benaiah Jones, Jr., stopped on the St. Joseph River in 1828; the village he laid out became Jonesville, and the Chicago road, and later three railroads, met there.
The original township, erected by act of March 17, 1835, when the county’s single township of Vance was divided by ranges, took in all of range 3 west from the northern boundary of the county to the state line; Scipio, Hillsdale, Cambria, Woodbridge and the west half of Amboy were later formed from it. Hillsdale was set off in 1855, leaving Fayette four by six miles: the southern tier of sections of town 5 south and the north half of town 6 south, range 3 west. The first township meeting was held on April 6, 1835, at the house of James D. Vanhoevenbergh, and elected Brooks Bowman supervisor. In 1836 the town voted a wolf bounty of up to two dollars a scalp.
Benaiah Jones, Jr., the first settler, came over the Chicago road in June 1828, about the third wagon to pass that way, Johnson says, and stayed with Captain Allen on Allen’s Prairie, living in his corn barn, while he chose his land. He built a log house on the west side of the St. Joseph River in section 4, on the site of the village he laid out, and it was the only house of entertainment there until he built the Fayette House in 1831–32. Thaddeus Wight was the first settler on the Chicago road between Jonesville and Allen. Johnson notes the remains of Indian burial mounds and the regret of settlers when the chief Baw Beese and his band were removed in 1840.
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By 1838 the township had 685 people, a grist mill, four sawmills and six merchants. Reynolds observes that much land entered before 1838 was held for speculation, and that many of the earliest residents were squatters who bought their land only years later.
The Detroit and Chicago turnpike, built between 1832 and 1836, crosses the township through Jonesville, where Johnson wrote in 1879 that the main line of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern met its Lansing division and the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw. The city of Jonesville lies within the township. The 2020 census counted 1,113 people in Fayette Township.