Hillsdale Township

The story

Welcome to Hillsdale Township

Hillsdale Township surrounds the city of Hillsdale. It was the southern half of Fayette until 1855, and the city, chartered in 1869, became a separate government. Its first settlers came in 1835, when the Potawatomi of the chief Baw Beese still lived and fished around the lake that bears his name.

In 1855 the south half of Fayette was organized as Hillsdale, three miles north to south and six east to west, the south half of Township 6 South, Range 3 West. It took in the village of Hillsdale, which on its incorporation as a city in April 1869 became a separate civil organization. In 1900 the township, without the city, had 447 people.

Johnson writes that when settlement began the country looked like a vast tract of marsh and wilderness, and that its early years were bound up with the Indian bands who stayed in the county until 1840. He tells how Baw Beese and his followers would come at night to a settler’s shanty for supper and each lay a silver quarter beside his plate. Caleb Bates and Jeremiah Arnold, the first settlers, came early in 1835 and located on the east line of the township; Reynolds says Bates brought his family from Ohio in February 1835, having taken up land a mile east of Hillsdale in 1834, and that his son Horatio trapped seven wolves on Wolf Point in Baw Beese Lake within two weeks. Garret Searles took land on the west bank of Sand Lake in 1835, and George and David Stone came to the northeast corner in 1836.