Isabella County Michigan

   Michigan Family History Network

1860 Census

From the Isabella Times News

The Real Isabella Pioneers


                 The labeling of a citizen"a pioneer", or of a family as a "pioneer
                    family" employs the use of a more or less comparative word or
                    phrase -- the fact, readily being recognized that there are pioneers and
                    "early pioneers", and still earlier pioneers.
 
                    However, in the list of early residents which the Times-News publishes this
                    week, no one could in seriousness deny that the names which appear
                    therein are other than those entitled to every recognition as truly Isabella
                    county's earliest of early pioneers.
 
                    The list is a copy of the first census of Isabella compiled in 1860, and that
                    is a date back pretty close to the beginning of things as far as this county
                    is concerned.  It was in April of that same year that Mt. Pleasant was
                    selected as the site of the county seat and this relocation authorized, which
                    took the seat of the county government from the uninhabited geographical
                    center of the county as had been originally outlined by the legislature when
                    the county was organized the year before.
 
                    Three years prior to this census, the federal government had built the
                    Indians a flour and saw mill on the Chippewa just north of the present
                    boundary of Mt. Pleasant.
 
                    Only six years before this census, the first road in the county had been
                    hacked out of the wilderness from the south county line to Salt River.
 
                    Many an interesting observation may be made in scanning this list of
                    real Isabella pioneers - the number who claimed New York as their parent
                    state, the number from Vermont, Ohio and other states, the recurrence of
                    many given names and the occupations as stated to the enumerator.
 
                    But the most interesting of the many interests awakened by a perusal of
                    the list will undoubtedly be the tracing of well-known families through a
                    succeeding generation or two down to the present day.  The list will
                    establish a sort of official degree of pioneership, and residents of
                    Isabella county interested in the traditions and early history of their own
                    section are deeply indebted to Mrs. Myrta Wilsey Burwash who copied the
                    list from the original record in Washington so that Times-News readers
                    might have it for examination and for reference.
 

 

 
 


Copied by Mrs. Myrta Wilsey Burwash

The first census taken in Isabella county was that of June 1860.
 There were three townships: Coe, Chippewa and Isabella.
A large number of Indians were omitted by Mrs. Burwash.
Chippewa Township

Coe Township

Isabella Township
 
 

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