Garden Township was obtained from McPherson County. Garden is one of five townships with a name chosen as a descriptor of their area. After Harvey County was established, a large number of Mennonite Christian families homesteaded most of the remaining government land* while other Mennonite Christians purchased large tracts of railroad land* in the Township. Located in Garden Twp was the now non-existent settlement of Garden City, at which a post office was established in 1872. Like Alta Twp, Garden Twp was originally settled by several French and Irish families who homesteaded on the Little Arkansas River and at the mouth of Turkey Creek in the fall of 1869 or the spring of 1870. *Note: As the federal government appropriated the lands of the Great Plains during the mid 1800s, Congress felt it had the right to make a distribution of the lands since many Euro-Americans believed the area was “empty and uninhabited.” As a result, large tracts of land were earmarked as government owned. It was made available to the “head of household” under the stipulations of the Homestead Act of 1862. At the same time, the U.S. government earmarked millions of acres as railroad owned. This land was made available as land grants to the railroad industry. The railroads then sold much of the land as a way to create revenue which financed the building of the railways. In the areas where there was both government and railroad land, the acreage’s designation was determined in an every-other-section (a section is one mile by one mile) format in a checkerboard pattern. Land sales were handled through separate government land offices and railroad land offices. Image from Edward’s Map of 1882.