A village named Shirland, to be located on Section 25 (near the present-day Olde Mill Golf Course), was platted and recorded in 1831, but it never developed.

[11] (Some scholars, however, place LaSalle's route across northern Kalamazoo County, a journey which would not have brought him across the Prairie Ronde.

[12]) Present-day Prairie Ronde Township was the first part of Kalamazoo County to be settled by European-Americans.

[13] At the time of settlement, Prairie Ronde was a part of St. Joseph County and in the township of Brady, which included all of future Kalamazoo and Barry counties and a large part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula to the north.

Kalamazoo County was set off with its present boundaries in 1829, and the southern half organized as Brady Township in 1830.

In 1836 they built a small chapel near Harrison Lake called the Ebenezer Episcopal Church of Prairie Ronde.

[19] Prairie Ronde Township has one site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Fanckboner-Nichols Farmstead (5992 W. VW Avenue) was established in 1838 by William and Elizabeth Crose Fanckboner, who had arrived with their five children from near Belvidere, New Jersey, the previous year.

Still owned by Fanckboner descendants, the family's Greek Revival farmhouse, built c. 1840, along with later outbuildings, stands in a small farmstead area at one corner of the 30-acre (120,000 m2) farm property on the corner of West VW Avenue and S 10th Street.

The farmstead, added to the Register in 2007, is preserved as an illustration of the lives of the early settlers on the Prairie Ronde.