The story
Welcome to Flowerfield Township
Flowerfield, in the northwest corner of the county, once took in all four northern townships. Its name comes from the wildflowers that sprang up each spring where the Potawatomi had burned the brush, and its old mill villages, Flowerfield and Howardville, grew up on the Rocky River.
Flowerfield covers surveyed Township 5 South, Range 12 West, about 22,700 acres with only about thirty-five acres of water. The Rocky River, rising in Penn Township of Cass County, runs east through its central sections, and its north branch comes down from a small lake near the old village of Flowerfield. Cutler says the Indians burned the brush and scrub every fall, and in spring such a profusion of wildflowers came up that the early surveyors called the country Flowerfield before the township was formed.
When the county was organized in 1829, Flowerfield township included the present townships of Leonidas, Mendon, Park and Flowerfield, and its only settlers were Mishael Beadle and his family, who lived in section 1. Beadle built the first log house and, in 1831, the first frame house, and his daughter Matilda married Justin Clark in 1830, the township’s first wedding. He built a grist mill on the Rocky River in 1831 with a single stone cut from a boulder; Challenge S. Wheeler bought it in 1832 and kept it running for twenty years.
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The first township meeting was held at Joshua Barnum’s house and tavern on April 1, 1833, the year Leonidas and Mendon were cut away; when Park was set off in 1838, Flowerfield shrank to its present size. The village of Flowerfield was surveyed in section 1 in 1833 by M. J. Nichols and Dr. David E. Brown, with Wheeler as first postmaster. Further south, Robert Gill began a dam on the Rocky in 1833, the Morse brothers built a sawmill, and Franklin Howard ran it from 1836 until his death in 1845, giving his name to Howardville; after 1856 people called it Tinker Town, for its postmaster Chauncey Tinker.
Both villages faded when the railroads passed them by. In 1865 the township voted ten thousand dollars in bonds for the Kalamazoo branch of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, though the line never touched the township; the courts found the vote illegal, but the bonds had already been sold and the township had to pay them. In the 1870s two flour mills and two sawmills still worked in the township. The Flowerfield Mills site at Main and Mill streets is a state historic site. Wikipedia gives the township’s 2020 census population as 1,587.