2/20/2024 0 Comments Perry township miResidents at the first school meeting decided to locate the Purdy School on the southeast corner of Morrice and Britton Roads. Seventeen years later, in December of 1858, the eighteen taxable households of the Morrice area petitioned to be set off as school district #5. The settlement that had grown up around the Purdy and Morrice farmsteads happened to fall in district #1, which meant that students walked a mile west toward Perry each day. The new board immediately established school districts. In 1841, the southern half of Bennington Township split off to form Perry Township. People met at each others’ houses, and later at the school. They founded their church on abstinence from liquor. The early settlers, all being Scotsmen, formed in 1839 The First Presbyterian Church of Bennington (Township)-a name later changed to Morrice. His three brothers settled nearby, though one quickly moved on. Without a bed at first, they slept on the ground, while wolves howled outside the door. At age 38, he had just married his childhood sweetheart (who may have been a widow by then). The northern half of his land eventually became the village of Morrice.Īround 1838, William Morrice (1800-73) came to the area and soon bought 160 acres northwest of the Purdys’ land. In the spring of 1837, he plowed his garden-the first plowed land in what was later called Perry township. Because bears kept attacking the family’s pigs, breakfast at the Purdy house included large helpings of bacon, bear meat, and wild fruits. Purdy made friends with the passing bands of Indians, who sometimes crowded into his cabin to sleep, or lightened their load by leaving their guns stacked in a corner for weeks at a time. In the fall of 1836, twenty-year-old Josiah Purdy (1816-68) built his cabin on the south side of what is now Britton road, between the intersections of Main and Gale Streets. Native hunters passed through the area, but did not stay. Britton Road was a well-traveled Indian trail worn a foot deep. White settlers later found lots of scattered bones. In 1763, Antrim Township just east of Morrice erupted into a battleground between these tribes during Pontiac’s War. Before Michigan became a state, the vicinity of Morrice lay in a no-man’s land between Chippewas (also called Ojibways) to the north, Pottawattomies to the west, Ottawas to the south, and Hurons to the east.
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