The story
Welcome to Greenfield Township
Greenfield Township, in the county’s north-east corner, was one of its two original townships. Its open prairies drew squatters from Michigan before the land was even surveyed, and its little village of Lexington, now Brighton, had the county’s first school.
Greenfield takes in surveyed Township 38 North, Range 11 East, and the east half of Range 10, along the Michigan line, with Lima to the west and Springfield and part of Bloomfield to the south. The Pigeon River crosses its south-west corner and the Fawn River its north-east; Wall Lake lies in sections 24 and 25. Its pride was two prairies: English Prairie in the center, named for the Englishmen who took it up, among them ‘Old Tommy’ Burnell, who wore knee breeches for years, and Pretty Prairie to the north-west of Lexington.
In 1829 a band of families from Ohio settled near White Pigeon, Michigan: Amos Barr, John and Samuel Anderson, William Miller, Benjamin Jones, John and Felix Miller, Jesse Huntsman, Ephraim Seeley and Jacob Croy. Learning of the prairies south of the line, they claimed them before the land came on the market, marking prairie claims with a plowed furrow and woodland claims with blazed trees. Amos Barr built a cabin without floor or roof in the fall of 1829 to hold his claim, and early in 1830 Miller and Jones loaded their goods, and the roof of the cabin they had wintered in, onto wagons and moved to the site of Lexington. Pretty Prairie got its name, Ford says, when a visitor from Ohio looked across it in autumn and said, ‘You might call it Pretty Prairie.’
Read the full story
When the county was organized in 1832 it was divided on May 14 into two townships, Lima on the west and Greenfield on the east. Springfield and Milford were later cut from Greenfield. The 1874 atlas says the first election in the county was held here in October 1831, for state legislators, when the settlers all voted for the candidate who would send the Wabash and Erie Canal by the Wabash route and keep land prices down. Jane M. Clark taught a three-month school in an old building at Lexington in the fall of 1830, the first in the township. In 1834 Samuel Burnside built a sawmill on Crooked Creek in the north-east corner, and Peter Bisel added a gristmill about 1846; the hamlet of Greenfield Mills grew there.
Lexington was platted in July 1836 by the surveyor John Kromer for Abraham K. Brower and Joseph Skettitt, in sections 25 and 30. Peter Bisel’s store carried as much as $6,000 in goods, and the post office was named Brighton, which became the name of the place. The same year Elisha U. Shepard and Bazaleel Alvord laid out Vistula on Wall Lake; it was sold to Eastern buyers from a map on glossy oiled silk, but no house was ever built. In 1840 a Methodist revival at the Pretty Prairie schoolhouse added more than seventy members, and in 1843 Elder Samuel Bradford formed the anti-slavery ‘Congregation of Saints’ at Lexington. Spiritualist circles later met in the township for many years.
The St. Joseph Valley Railroad crossed one corner of the township but had no station here. Ford counted 1,018 people in 1890 and 913 in 1910, and about 100 at Brighton. The 2020 census counted 1,323 people in Greenfield Township.