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| This township was organized in 1837 by taking a portion of Raisinville, Dundee and Summerfield, giving in geographical area a perfectly square form of thirty-six sections, there being, besides this, but six townships so arranged. It is watered by small streams flowing into and forming Otter Creek, which empites into Lake Erie in La Salle township. The first settlers were mostly from the eastern and middle states, and all farmers. The names of these were in part George Willard, Chauncy Owen, Joseph Gregory, Anthony Briggs, Mathew Fredenburg, Alonzo Durrin, Wm. Richardson, Josiah Kellogg, David Brainard, John Campbell, John W. Talbot, the latter being of the family of the Talbots who were large manufacturers in New England, and all of them people of excellent character. Others followed rapidly and a fine community of practical agriculturists was built up. The supervisors who respresented the township in the county legislature were men of sound judgment and conservative methods, such as Peter K. Zacharias, Wm. L. Riggs, Nathaniel Langdon and Wesley Conant. The first township election was held at the residence of Thomas S. Clarke, when Hiram Carney was elected the first supervisor. The name of Simeon Van Aiken often occurs in the records as a representative man of the township. There are two post offices, one at Ida village, Emma M. Snell, postmistress, and the other at Lulu, of which Andrew Schultz is postmaster. The geological features in Ida are not important, though some stone quarries exist at several points from which building stone and lime are obtained, in sections 19, 20, and 21 there is, according to the geological department surveys of 1900, a deepening of the rock, elsewhere quite thin; the soil is somewhat sandy and there are belts of loam which pursue an eccentric course in a northeast and southwest direction; in some cases the soil vanishes entirely, exposing the bedrock. In the deep well at Ida forty-five feet of sand rock was penetrated. The greater breadth of the belt of Sand Rock at Ida in the eastern portion does not seem to be due to increased thickness, but rather to the positions of the beds. (Reference is made to the chapter of Geology of Monroe County.) In the early days of the township it was reckoned by sportsmen and woodsmen of Monroe as one of the greatest deer hunting regions in the state, and the great woods were often the scene of many hunters' cabins, through the late fall and winter, where parties from the city would resort for weeks at a time and pack out fine specimens of "antlered buck" and not unseldom a bear or wildcat. The village of Ida is located in the extreme northwestern portion of the township and contains a population of several hundred, with good schools and quite a respectable number of merchantile institutions, with a station of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad (branch from Monroe to Adrian), with telegraph and telephone facilities. |