The first actual settlement in the present township was made in May, 1837, on the west side of Jefferson Prairie, by Stephen E. Downer and Daniel Tasker, and their wives, on the southeast side of the prairie. In July, Oscar H. Pratt and Franklin Mitchell, from Joliet, Illinois, made claims. These were the earliest. On the west side of the prairie settlement was made in October, 1837, by H. L. Warner, Henry Tuttle, Albert Tuttle, and Griswold Weaver. We recall that Ole Nattestad said that when he came to Clinton on July first, 1838, there were eight Americans living isolated at considerable distance from him. Nattestad located on section twenty. Here Christopher Nyhus also settled, while Thore Helgeson settled on section twenty-nine. Who the eight settlers were that Nattestad met, remains somewhat uncertain, but it does not seem unlikely that it was the four last mentioned, and some of the first explorers, who are named as Charles Tuttle, Dennis Mills, Milton S. Warner, and William S. Murrey. The Town of Turtle, directly west of Clinton, was not organized until 1846. The first settlers were S. G. Colley, who located on section thirty-two, in the spring of 1838, and Daniel D. Egery, who came there about the same time, locating on section thirty-six (to Beloit, however, in 1837). Such were the beginnings of settlement east of Beloit prior to Nattestad's coming, and it was still virtually a wilderness when Ansten Nattestad's party came at the close of September, 1839. West of Beloit, in the Town of Newark, the Norwegians were the first, while in Avon and Spring Valley they were among the earliest groups of settlers. It is the settlement of this region, and especially the Town of Newark, to which we shall now turn. We observed above that some of Ansten Nattestad's party who came to Jefferson Prairie in September, 1839, did not remain there. These went fourteen miles farther west and established a settlement in the Township of Newark, which had not been settled by white men before, while a few of the members of this latter party went south from there eighteen miles, crossing the Illinois line, and located in the Township of Rock Run, in Stephenson County, Illinois.