Byron Township's first farm belonged to a man who never worked it

Nathan Boynton picked out the first farm in Byron Township in 1835 and never got to break the ground. He fell ill before he could improve the claim, so his brothers Jeremiah and William came down and did the clearing, becoming the township’s first residents in 1836. That’s the founding story south of Wyoming, in the country around Byron Center: a man who chose the land and two who actually settled it.

The township organized that same year, 1836, and held its first town meeting not in Byron at all but at a house over in Grandville — the nearest place with a roof big enough for the business. More settlers trickled in starting the next year, and the real change came after that.

You’ll sometimes hear the township was named for Lord Byron, the English poet. It’s a tidy story, but the township’s own early record doesn’t claim it — it only marks the Boyntons’ arrival — so the name’s origin is better left an open question than repeated as fact.

What isn’t in doubt is what Byron Center became. Over the following decades it filled with Dutch families, part of the broad wave of Dutch immigrants who settled across western Kent and Ottawa counties through the mid-1800s. That heritage never really left: it’s still legible in the area’s churches, its schools, and a phone book full of Dutch surnames. The first farm may have changed hands before it was even cleared, but the people who came after stuck around for good.