People have lived, worked and played in what we now call Brown Township since the end of the last Ice Age. With the Manistee River an important transportation route, abundant wild food and fertile well-watered crop lands, indigenous peoples thrived for millennia and their descendants live here to the present time.

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With the arrival in the early 1840s of people of European origin, drastic changes took place.  Several decades of needless exploitation left the land stripped of forests, burned over and the streams degraded.  Following the “logging era” a stable farming community developed with roads, schools and eventually electrification bringing us gradually into the modern world.