Oaklandon Historic District

This township is situated in the extreme northeastern portion of the county, and is seven miles square, containing forty-nine square miles, or thirty thousand eight hundred and nineteen acres of land. It is bounded on the north by Hamilton County, on the east by Hancock County, on the south by Warren township, and on the west by Washington township. The surface of the country is generally level, except along the streams, where it is somewhat broken, and in some localities hilly. The soil is well adapted to the culture of wheat, corn, rye, barley, and most vegetables, but the culture of fruit has proved to be unprofitable during the past few years, though in a few localities this branch of agriculture has yielded a good revenue. About thirty-five years ago immense crops of peaches were raised, but the peach crop has been almost an entire failure during the last twenty years. The soil is principally clay, but consists of four grades, viz. : white clay, or beech flats ; black loam of the flats ; limestone or clay hills ; and bottomland, or dark chocolate loam intermixed with sand. Originally the township was covered with a heavy growth of timber, consisting principally of walnut, sugar, poplar, ash, beech, hickory, sycamore, lime, buckeye, oak, and hackberry. In the lowlands, the primitive forest abounded with grape-vines, frequently growing to an enormous height. Beneath the forest and the net-work of vines grew pawpaws, leatherwood, prickly-ash, black haw, and other underbrush. At the Lawrence district fair, September, 1883, John Johnson exhibited fifty-four natural varieties of timber of the township. Nearly all the valuable timber was recklessly destroyed in the clearing of the land, or has since been sold in the market. In an early day the level lands were covered with immense sheets of water, quagmires, and ponds.

Passage source: History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, published 1884.

Lawrence township was erected April 16, 1822, by order of the board of county commissioners, and on the same day and by the same authority it was joined to Washington for purposes of township organization (neither township being sufficiently populous to be organized separatelyj. This union of the two townships as one continued until Sept. 4, 1826, when the board of justices ordered that Lawrence be taken from Washington and separately organized, and that an election be held on the first Saturday in the following October at the house of John Johnson for choice of a justice of the peace for Lawrence, Alexander Wilson to be inspector of said election. The election was held as ordered, and resulted in the choice of Peter Casteller as justice of the peace. The following is a list of officers of the township from its erection to the present time, viz. :

Passage source: History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, published 1884.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Lawrence Township - 25,786 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.