[4] Allendale Charter Township is best known as being home to the main campus of Grand Valley State University.

200 BCE to 500 CE, earliest evidence suggests occupation by Goodall focus, a Middle Woodland Hopewellian culture.

At the time of European contact, Anishinaabe-speaking peoples, the Odawa and the Potawatomi lived within the current township.

[5] The first documented European in what is now Allendale was Pierre Constant, a French fur trader who established a trading post at Charleston for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in 1810.

[6] The first permanent European settler[7] was Richard Roberts, of Wales, who purchased one hundred and sixty acres along the Grand River, building a log cabin in 1842 that became known as the Half-way House, as it was situated roughly halfway between Grand Haven and Grandville.

Allendale experiences a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfb), warm to hot summers and cold winters, similar to most of the Midwestern United States.

The main campus of Grand Valley State University, founded in 1960, is located in Allendale Charter Township on 1,237 acres (5.01 km2).

The university enrolls a total of just under 25,000 students on the Allendale campus and two campuses in the surrounding area, and offers over 200 areas of study, making it the largest university in the Grand Rapids region.

[20] One of the statues, installed in 1998, depicting a Confederate and Union soldier standing back-to-back with a young slave crouched between them at their feet, has been controversial for seeming to honor the Confederacy[21][22] and portraying racial dynamics in a way considered disrespectful to Black people.

[23][24][25] During the George Floyd protests in 2020, the civil war statue received heightened scrutiny from local activists.

Philomena Mantella, president of Grand Valley State University, suggested that it should be moved and that its presentation should be altered to acknowledge its historical context.

[26][27] Protests on the issue continued through 2021, including the temporary erection of a billboard[28] and multiple acts of vandalism that left the statue disfigured.