The story
Welcome to Park Township
Park Township, north of Three Rivers, was named for the park-like groves and openings the first settlers found. Its pioneers squatted on the edge of the Nottawa-seepe reservation along Fisher’s Lake in 1834, and the Portage River powered the mills of Parkville.
Park covers surveyed Township 5 South, Range 11 West, with only about three hundred acres of water, mostly Fisher’s Lake in the south. The Portage River drains it, its two branches uniting in Lockport. Cutler says the land was a succession of dense oak groves and level openings, ‘resembling more than all else a series of well-kept parks,’ which gave the township its name. Its eastern sections were part of the Nottawa-seepe reservation, which the Potawatomi gave up by treaty in September 1833.
Soon after the treaty, squatters began taking claims on the eastern part of the reservation. In the fall of 1834 Harvey Kinney, helped by Jonas and Leonard Fisher and George Leland, built a cabin on the east shore of Fisher’s Lake, named for the Fishers. Isaac S. Ulrich and his wife came from Pennsylvania after a journey of seventy-two days, and Samuel Moore, Michael Hower, John Boudeman, Isaac Mowrey and John Hutchinson followed by 1836. Ulrich sowed the first wheat in 1835, and his son Madison, born that December, was the first child born in the township.
Read the full story
Park was set off from Flowerfield in 1838, and its first town meeting, held at John Hutchinson’s house in April, elected Edward S. Moore supervisor. The first schoolhouse was built of logs by the settlers in the fall of 1838, and Ulrich opened it as teacher the next spring. Harvey Kinney built the first sawmill in 1838. A Methodist circuit rider named Kellogg preached in the township in 1837, the Park burying ground society was organized in 1852, and an Evangelical church was built in 1853.
In 1851 James Hutchinson surveyed the village of Parkville on land Luther Carlton had bought in section 24. A woolen factory was built there on a millpond on the Portage in 1851, and a sawmill and grist mill in 1853, the township says. Moore Park, a station on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, was established in 1871 and named for Edward S. Moore, whose home was nearby, and the Flowerfield depot stood in the northwest corner of the township. Frank Dentler of Parkville invented a machine for weighing and measuring grain as it came from a thresher. The township hall is in Parkville. The 2020 census counted 2,397 people in Park Township.