The story
Welcome to Clay Township
Clay Township lies just west of LaGrange, in the middle of the county. It was so full of swamps and dense timber that it was the last township organized, though it was nearest to the county seat, and it has never had a village of its own.
Clay covers surveyed Township 37 North, Range 9 East, with Van Buren and Lima to the north, Bloomfield and the town of LaGrange to the east, Clearspring to the south and Newbury to the west. Ford (1920) says that of its thirty-six sections only five or six were fit for settlement at first; the rest was dense timber and impassable marsh, ‘everglades and swamps’ of standing water and green scum. Buck Creek flooded twice a year. Buck Lake on the north line, before drainage, was a favorite camping place of the Potawatomi, and the ground around it was long rich in their relics and held small burial grounds.
The first land certificate was issued to Nathan Jenks of Ontario on June 9, 1835. Among the later entries, on July 20, 1836, was one by Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator, for the east half of the northeast quarter of section 9, which he later sold to Senator James A. Bayard. The 1874 atlas names John Ryason as one of the first settlers; he bought land in section 24 in October 1835 and moved onto it in the spring of 1836. Erastus Clark, one of the first justices, settled on the Clearspring line about the same time, and Ernestus Schermerhorn, Elisha Taylor, Hezekiah Beebee, the widow Dorcas Bailey and Jacob Mosher were other early settlers, most of them from the East and New England.
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The township was organized on September 4, 1838, the last in the county; its early records are lost, and Ford found them fairly complete only from 1842. The 1882 history speaks of the ‘appalling mortality’ of 1838, and the winter of 1842–43 kept deep snow on the ground until April 3, when many cattle starved and froze. Settlers traded at Lima and later at LaGrange. George Wood built a sawmill on Buck Creek in section 15 in 1837 or 1838; by 1874 a gristmill stood on the site, and E. Fleck’s mills made a flour known all over the county. Bog iron was dug from Hobb’s Marsh for the works near Lima.
In 1874 the township still had no church building; meetings were held in the schoolhouses. Samantha Overacker and Elizabeth Clark taught the first schools, in sections 18 and 23. On January 20, 1876, the boiler of the Price and Kennedy steam sawmill two miles north-west of LaGrange exploded and killed three men. In 1882 the county bought a farm west of LaGrange for its poor, and a county infirmary was built there. Ford counted 1,306 people in 1890 and 1,015 in 1910. Ditching drained much of the marsh, and peppermint was among its crops in 1919. The 2020 census counted 3,823 people in Clay Township.