The story
Welcome to Clay Township
Clay Township is the wedge of land east of the St. Joseph River between South Bend and the Michigan line, named in 1840 for Henry Clay. It holds the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College and the town of Roseland, and its little creeks once turned one of the oldest gristmills in the valley.
Clay was formed by the county board in 1840; Howard (1907) gives May 5, and Chapman (1880) the June session. Its boundaries were settled in 1842: the Michigan line on the north, the middle line of Range 3 East on the east, the south line of Township 38 North, and the St. Joseph River on the west, so that its western part had belonged to German Township and its eastern part to Harris and Penn. Howard says its people were proud that it was named for Henry Clay, then at the height of his fame. The first election was held in Brooks’ barn on section 30, and Jonathan Hardy and Samuel Brooks were the first justices of the peace.
The first settlements were along the river. Howard names Benjamin Potter, John Hague and William McCombs in 1829, John and Peter Cripe and Thomas Longley in 1830, and Peter and Jacob Eaton in 1831. Gideon and Ariel E. Drapier, Thomas P. and William F. Bulla and Evan C. Chalfant all took land on section 31, and the Bullas, Howard notes, were kin of the Julian family of Wayne County and “uncompromising opponents of African slavery.” The first school was kept in John Eyler’s house by Charles Murray, and the first schoolhouse, Chapman says, was on section 28 with Daniel A. Veasey as teacher.
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Four miles north of South Bend, where a small, steady stream came down a wooded glen into the St. Joseph, Jonas Harris, a Quaker from Richmond, Indiana, built a gristmill in the winter of 1836–37. Under later owners it was the Sheffield mill and then Siders’ mill, and for more than sixty years farmers lined up their wagons there in the fall to have their grain ground. Harris was buried on his farm behind the mill. A muskrat’s burrow under the flume, a summer storm and a washed-out foundation finally toppled the old gray mill a few years before 1901; the South Bend Power Company cleared the ruin. Weaver’s carding and fulling mill and Stephen Ullery’s carding machine also stood on Clay’s creeks.
Chapman called Clay’s farmland “rather poor” but its six brick schoolhouses as good as any in the state, and beyond them lay “two mighty literary institutions,” Notre Dame and St. Mary’s, in the southwest corner. The Michigan Central branch to Niles and later an interurban ran north through the township. In 1900 it had 1,150 people, counting the two schools. Today South Bend, Mishawaka, Roseland and part of Granger reach into it. The 2020 census counted 34,235 people in Clay Township.