The story
Welcome to Litchfield Township
Litchfield Township, in the northwest of Hillsdale County, was settled in the spring of 1834 by Henry Stevens and Samuel Riblet and set off from Allen in 1837. The village of Litchfield, platted by Hervey Smith beside his sawmill in 1836, grew quickly after the Lansing branch of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern arrived in 1872.
Litchfield is surveyed Township 5 South, Range 4 West. It was part of Allen until the Legislature, in the winter of 1836–37, authorized its organization and named Samuel Riblet, a justice of the peace of Allen, to preside over the first election, held on the first Monday of April 1837; about twenty votes were cast, and Harvey Eggleston was elected supervisor. A meeting in the winter of 1836 voted down Pulaski, Smithfield and Lewis and sent the name Columbus to the Legislature.
Henry Stevens settled on section 13 and Samuel Riblet on section 15 in the spring of 1834, and on May 20, 1834, the first furrow in the town was turned on Stevens’s farm, with every inhabitant present taking a turn at the plough. Others followed on scattered sections, and in 1836 James Jones, Samuel Frisbee and the three Todd brothers made the first settlement in the timber west of Sand Creek. The first sermon was preached in June 1835 by the missionary Stephen Wilcox in Riblet’s log house to seven hearers, and a Methodist society was formed. Until schools and mills came, the settlers went to Marshall to mill.
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In May 1836 a mail route was opened between Jonesville and Marshall, carried on an Indian pony by a boy of thirteen along an Indian trail, and that fall a post office was set up with Hervey Smith as postmaster. That summer Smith bought sixty-five acres on sections 10 and 15, built a sawmill and platted the village; George C. Munro of Jonesville bought the mill and water power and built a flouring mill in 1841. Isaac Agard taught the first school in the winter of 1837–38, the first frame schoolhouse went up in 1839, the Baptist church was formed in 1839, and the first church, the old Methodist, was built in 1841. In 1838 the township had 314 people.
The village grew slowly until the Lansing branch of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern was finished in the spring of 1872; Johnson says its business then more than doubled, and it was incorporated in 1877. The city of Litchfield lies within the township. The 2020 census counted 1,029 people in Litchfield Township.