Resolved into wheat fields

The township is the northwest corner of LaGrange County, Michigan on one side and Elkhart County on the other, with the Pigeon River running through the middle of it. It was named in 1837 for the man who had just been elected president.

Getting there was a walk.

The land opened for purchase in 1831 and the nearest land office was at Fort Wayne, so in that year Ami Lawrence, Obadiah Lawrence, Nathaniel Callahan, and Asa Olney set out from Lima on foot and followed the Indian trail down to enter their farms. Olney made the same trip alone afterward, three days each way, and remembered it well enough to tell somebody about it fifty years later.

He remembered the prairie wolves, which were numerous, and the sound they made cracking bones over their evening meal while he was trying to sleep. He remembered one night when a party of Potawatomi held a war dance near where he was resting, over the body of an enemy.

The ground east of the village was heavily timbered and remarkably clear of underbrush, because the Potawatomi had been burning it. The grass came up thick and the trees were full of wild honey.

Olney entered eighty acres to start. He enlarged the farm considerably on the proceeds of a two acre patch of turnips and a half acre of melons. The sandy ground grew astonishing vines. Thirty pound melons were ordinary and pumpkins came in at a hundred, and the whole crop found a good market up at White Pigeon and Constantine.

Wheat hauled to Constantine in 1834 brought thirty-five cents a bushel and corn brought eighteen. The prices doubled by 1836.

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In June of 1836, three men laid out a village.

Francis Rhoads, Isaac Buckley, and Eppah Robbins owned the land on the Vistula road, the state road meant to run from Toledo through to South Bend. They platted a town on it and named it Marion. The owner of the plat put up a tavern. James Belote and Buckley opened a store.

Battey's history says that by vigorous effort the projectors of Marion built up quite a huddle.

Then it became evident that it could never grow up to the paper.

So the people who owned the lots got together and signed a petition asking that the village be resolved into wheat fields. The petition was granted, and Marion disappeared forever.

Somebody had to sit down and write that document. Whoever it was had bought a lot in a town two or three years earlier and was now asking the county to stop it from being a town at all.

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Four miles away there was already a real one.

The Martin brothers, Seldon and Phylammen and Alfred, bought two hundred eighty acres from the government in December of 1833. They built a sawmill on the Pigeon in the summer of 1834 and a flouring mill the year after. The mosquitoes were bad enough that first summer that they could not sleep on the ground, so they built a platform up in the trees and slept in that.

The village went in around the mills and was surveyed in 1837. The post office opened the year before under the name Scott, sitting on the mail line between White Pigeon and Fort Wayne.

A man named Pierce built a blacksmith shop in 1836, and in 1837 the township elected him its first justice of the peace. Battey notes what followed: the village smithy became the hall of justice.

The Martins started a distillery in a large log building near the mill in 1836 and ran it past 1840. Battey gives the reason it closed without comment or apology. The removal of the Potawatomi ended the greater part of the demand.

At its best the place turned out fifteen thousand barrels of flour a year and three hundred fifty thousand feet of lumber. There were two stores, two doctors, a cooper, a wagon shop, a carpenter, a tavern, two shoemakers, and a church that all the denominations used.

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Then the Michigan Southern was built, and it did not come through.

Writing in 1882, Battey says the village would have fulfilled all its early promise had it not been for the perverse running of the railway too far to the north. By then the mills were doing little more than custom work.

He also notes that the railroad had been very good for the county generally. Land that had been five dollars an acre in 1837 went from ten dollars to twenty when the line went in at White Pigeon.

The place it was good for was not this one.

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Ford's history came through in 1920 and disposed of the village in five words.

No village exists there today.

In his list of the county's platted towns he gives it one line: Van Buren, a small platting, known as Scott Postoffice.

He does record a village in the township. It is in Section 32, it is a station point on a railroad, and it consists of a station, a few small business houses, and, in his phrase, plenty of room in which to expand as the years coming will certainly demand.

It is called Seybert. It does not appear anywhere in Battey's history, because in 1882 there was nothing there to write about.

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Three villages, then. One that its own owners asked the county to turn back into wheat, one that a railroad passed by, and one that a railroad made.

Battey closed his chapter on the township by observing that its history had afforded little of interest since 1871.