Township of Chandler, Beaver Islands

Summary

Chandler was a civil township of the Beaver Island archipelago, covering the north end of Beaver Island together with the outer islands. It was created by Act No. 86 of 1861, approved 1 March 1861, which enlarged and renamed the existing township of Garden Island; its first township meeting was appointed at the school house in school district number two, in the village of St. James. Its territory was the part of Beaver Island lying north of the quarter line through sections 27, 28 and 29 of town 39 north, range 10 west, plus High, Trout, Whiskey, Squaw (now Ojibwa), Garden, Hog and Hat islands and the bars and shoals contiguous to them.

The township was in Manitou County until that county was disorganized in 1895, then in Charlevoix County. Local Act No. 366 of 1897, approved 18 March 1897, disorganized and vacated it and attached its territory to Peaine. It existed for thirty-six years. Two mainland Michigan townships were also named Chandler in the same period, and separating the three is a documented hazard in the records.

History

Garden Island Township, 1859

The township began under another name. Local Act No. 194 of 1859, approved 15 February 1859 and printed at page 546, took “all that part of Manitou county designated and known as Hat, Hog and Garden Islands, (now a part of Peaine township,)” and organized it as a separate township called Garden Island. The first township meeting was appointed at “the school-house in the village of Peaine, on Garden Island.”¹

That township was made of outer islands only. It took in no part of Beaver Island, and its first meeting was appointed on Garden Island rather than at the harbour.

The act of 1861

Act No. 86 of 1861 is titled “An act to amend an act entitled an act to re-organize the township of Garden Island, and to change the name of said township.” Its single substantive section reads:

That all that portion of Beaver Island lying north of a parallel with the quarter line running east and west through sections twenty-seven, twenty-eight and twenty-nine, township thirty-nine north, of range ten west, and High Island, Trout Island, Whiskey Island, Squaw Island, Garden Island, Hog Island and Hat Island, and all of the bars and shoals contiguous to said islands, shall be organized into a township by the name of Chandler; and the first township meeting shall be held at the schoolhouse in school district number two, in the village of St. James

James T. Bailey, Flavius J. Smith and Edward O’Brien were named as inspectors of election for that meeting. The act took immediate effect and was approved 1 March 1861.²

Two changes came together. The township gained the northern part of Beaver Island, including the harbour village of St. James, and it gained High, Trout, Whiskey and Squaw islands; and its centre of gravity moved from Garden Island to the harbour, where the meeting was now to be held. From 1861 Manitou County had five townships rather than the four the 1855 organizing act had made.

The act’s own title describes it as amending an earlier act “to re-organize the township of Garden Island.” The 1859 act held here is titled “An act to organize a certain township in the county of Manitou,” which is not the same wording, and no intervening act touching Garden Island has been found in the volumes held. The identification of the amended act is therefore probable rather than established; see Open questions.

Vacation, 1897

Manitou County was disorganized by Local Act No. 362 of 1895, which attached the Beaver group to Charlevoix County. That act’s saving clause preserved the township organization of Manitou, Patmos, Peaine and Galilee — the four townships of the 1855 act — and does not mention Chandler at all, which had been created six years after the act it was repealing.³ Chandler nevertheless survived the county’s end: it is named as an existing Charlevoix County township two years later.

Local Act No. 366 of 1897 ended it in four short sections:

That the township of Chandler, in the Beaver Islands, and within the county of Charlevoix, be and the same is hereby disorganized and vacated, and the territory is hereby attached to the township of Peaine, in said county of Charlevoix.

Its books, papers and records became the property of Peaine and were to be deposited with the Peaine township clerk; its outstanding debts became a charge on “the consolidated township of Peaine”; and the polling place of the reorganized Peaine was fixed “in the village of St. James.” The act was approved 18 March 1897 and took immediate effect.⁴ Local Act No. 363, approved the same day, vacated Galilee into Peaine in identical terms.⁵

A modern local-history timeline, summarising Joan C. Vyse’s 2002 research, places the vacation differently. It dates the creation of the Township of Saint James by the Charlevoix County board to 1901 and adds that “it is likely that Chandler Township was vacated as part of this act.”⁶ The 1897 statute is a direct record of the vacation and the timeline offers 1901 as a likelihood rather than a finding; both are set out here rather than reconciled.

Geography

The township’s Beaver Island portion was everything north of an east–west line across sections 27, 28 and 29 of T39N R10W — the quarter line, the survey line through the middle of a section, so the boundary cut those three sections in half. That line put the harbour, the village of St. James and the island’s north end inside Chandler and left the rest of Beaver Island in Peaine.

Beyond Beaver Island the township took in seven named islands — High, Trout, Whiskey, Squaw, Garden, Hog and Hat — with their contiguous bars and shoals. The township’s reach was therefore close to that of the modern Township of Saint James, which also pairs the island’s north end with the outer islands. The two are not continuous: Chandler ended in 1897, Peaine held the whole archipelago for the rest of the century, and the Township of Saint James was created out of Peaine afterwards.

No mapped boundary for Chandler is held here. The statutory description is exact enough to be drawn from the public-land survey, but that has not been done.

Names

Three Michigan townships called Chandler

The name is not distinctive, and the confusion it causes is on the record. Two mainland Michigan townships named Chandler were organized in 1880, and both of their organizing records are printed in the appendix to the 1881 session laws, while the island township was still in existence:⁷

The archipelago lies in T37–40N, R9–12W, so the township and range printed in a survey description separate the three immediately. Where a record gives only a county, the county separates them before 1895, because the mainland Chandler was never in Manitou County, and after March 1897, because the island township no longer existed. The years 1895 to 1897 are the ambiguous window, when a Charlevoix County island Chandler and a Charlevoix County mainland Chandler existed at the same time. Both mainland townships are still going concerns: Michigan’s jurisdiction file for the November 2024 general election lists a Chandler Township in Charlevoix County and another in Huron County, alongside Peaine Township.⁸

A further hazard is lexical. In nineteenth-century Michigan session laws the word “chandler” is usually a trade, not a place: “tallow chandler’s shop” belongs to the standard nuisance-abatement clause of a city charter, and in the 1889 and 1907 volumes held here every one of the thirteen occurrences of the word in each is that phrase. Neither volume contains any island-township material at all.⁹

The origin of the name, and Squaw Island

No source held here says why the township was named Chandler, or after whom. The 1861 act simply changes the name.

Squaw Island, named in the act, is the island now carried in federal names data as Ojibwa Island. Every nineteenth-century record of the township uses the older form, and a search of that material under the modern name returns nothing.

Significance

Chandler is the missing term in the island’s township history. Between 1861 and 1897 the harbour, the village of St. James and the whole outer archipelago were not in Peaine and not in any township named for the harbour: they were in Chandler. Assessment rolls, school-district records, highway records and election returns for the north end of the island in those thirty-six years are Chandler records, and neither the Peaine nor the Saint James series covers them.

It also explains a gap. Peaine held the whole island only between March 1897, when Galilee and Chandler were vacated into it, and the Charlevoix board’s creation of the Township of Saint James at the end of the century. The two-township arrangement that has governed Beaver Island ever since is younger than the county that once contained it.

Added 20 August 2026. Recent changes