The story
Welcome to Reading Township
Reading Township, in western Hillsdale County, sits on the high ridge where the waters part for Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. John Mickle opened the first road south from Jonesville and settled here in October 1835; the township was organized in 1837, and the railroad of 1869 made Basswood Corners the busy village of Reading.
Reading was organized in 1837, with the first town meeting on April 3, when James Fowle was chosen supervisor; it then took in all the county south of township 6 south, with only 227 people. In 1839 Camden was set off, leaving Reading six miles square, Township 7 South, Range 4 West. The petitioners had asked for Troy or Utica; those names being taken, the Legislature, without consulting them again, named the towns Litchfield and Reading, which Johnson says were supposed to come from towns in Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
A high ridge runs through the east of the town, highest at Reading village. Johnson describes its streams going every way, some south or east to Lake Erie by the Little St. Joseph and Maumee, the rest west or north by Hog Creek and the St. Joseph to Lake Michigan. In the west a chain of lakes runs nearly across the town: south to Turner’s Lake and a branch of the Little St. Joseph, north through the old ‘Hog Lakes’, chief of them Long Lake, with Berry Lake beside it, Hemlock Lake on the north line in section 5, and Round Lake, sounded to seventy feet.
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Advised by a trader named Rice of Perrysburg, Ohio, that this was the best government land he knew, John Mickle came on October 5, 1835, with his wife, child and a hired man, Ephraim Wiltsie, opening the first road south from Jonesville by way of Sand Creek. He bought the south half of section 3, built a log shanty near a spring and sheltered the families of thirteen settlers while they chose land; three years later he replaced it with a blockhouse of squared black-walnut logs. Eleazer Gleason, William Berry, the Powells and others followed, though speculators’ holdings slowed settlement. Reynolds says that up to 1850 there was not a store, grocery or tavern in the town. The Baptist church was organized on August 24, 1839.
The town bonded itself for $15,000 to bring in the railroad from Jackson toward Fort Wayne, built through in 1868–69; the first regular train from Jackson arrived on November 9, 1869, and Johnson says the village’s business was believed to have quadrupled. The village, formerly Basswood Corners, was incorporated on April 12, 1873. The city of Reading lies within the township. The 2020 census counted 1,910 people in Reading Township.