Kalamazoo And How It Grew

By Willis Frederick Dunbar, George G. Mallinson and Richard N. Gregg

Most of Kalamazoo County’s early white settlers were fur traders from England or New York. The remainder came from Pennsylvania and Maryland. After 1845 the number of foreign immigrants increased rapidly especially with the coming of the Hollanders in 1850. The growth rate of the county’s population reached its height between 1845-1860, when almost 8,000 newcomers settled there. That growth rate was not exceeded for 50 years when, between 1904-1920, the population grew to 214,000, quite an increase over the 1860 figure. Increased immigration, better transportation, and the appearance of diversified industries all played a role in Kalamazoo County’s growth.

“Every community has its roots in the past. Its people live in the present and look to the future, but their way of life and their patterns of thought are conditioned by their heritage. A widespread understanding of that heritage is essential in order that progress may be planned wisely.

“Hence, it has seemed desirable to gather into a single volume the story of Kalamazoo’s growth from a tiny fur-trading post in the wilderness to a modern metropolitan center.”—Willis F. Dunbar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Dec 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789128093

Willis Frederick Dunbar

WILLIS FREDERICK DUNBAR (1902-1970) was born in Hartford, Michigan and graduated from Kalamazoo College. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan. He served as a faculty member and dean at Kalamazoo College from 1929-1942 and a faculty member and department chairperson at Western Michigan University from 1941-1970. Dunbar also served as the vice mayor of Kalamazoo, Michigan from 1951-1953 and 1955-1957. He was a familiar figure in Michigan homes as a frequent radio and TV commentator on Michigan affairs, past and present, serving as program director and director of public affairs at WKZO a Kalamazoo, Michigan, radio station from 1943-1951. He was a member of the American Historical Association and served as President of the Michigan Historical Commission, Historical Society of Michigan, and the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. He was a frequent lecturer on subjects of local, state and regional interest, and was broadly active in civic and cultural affairs. Dr. Dunbar was the author of numerous articles in educational and historical journals, and wrote a number of books on various phases of Michigan history, including Michigan Through the Centuries (1952), The Michigan Record in Higher Education (1963), Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (1965), and All Aboard! A History of Railroads in Michigan (1966). He passed away in 1970. RICHARD N. GREGG was an art museum director and wrote articles for such magazines as Antiques, Connoisseur, Curator, American Artist and Museum News. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Michigan in 1950. He died in Miami Beach, Florida on March 8, 1988 aged 61. GEORGE G. MALLINSON (1917-1994) was Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Western Michigan University.

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

KALAMAZOO AND HOW IT GREW

BY

WILLIS F. DUNBAR

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

INTRODUCTION 5

PREFACE 6

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7

1. The First People 8

2. Fur Trade on the Kekalamasoe 14

3. The Pioneers 20

4. Boom Town of the ‘Thirties 27

5. Out of the Wilderness 38

6. Culture in a Pioneer Village 54

7. The Crisis of the Union 73

8. The Biggest Village in the U.S.A. 79

9. Kalamazoo in the Gilded Age 92

10. The Good Old Days 106

11. Change in the Air 126

12. The Prosperous’ Twenties 144

13. The Depression Years 159

14. New Challenges 166

15. Bursting at the Seams 178

16. Retrospect and Prospect 190

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 192

DEDICATION

To the people of Kalamazoo,

my friends and neighbors,

this book is affectionately dedicated.

INTRODUCTION

It has been the custom of the School of Graduate Studies, Western Michigan University, to publish from time to time the scholarly writings of the faculty. These publications appear in a series called Faculty Contributions. The previous publications have been disseminated widely and have been acclaimed for their excellence.

This volume is especially important since it stems from the pen of one of the most outstanding historians and teachers in the Midwest. Further, it chronicles the cultural heritage of a community to which Western Michigan University has been a significant contributor.

It is hoped sincerely that this volume will contribute to Kalamazoo and its people a clear understanding of the foundation on which the community was built and has prospered. If such is accomplished, the endeavor will have been eminently worthwhile.

George G. Mallinson,

Dean School of Graduate Studies

PREFACE

Every community has its roots in the past. Its people live in the present and look to the future, but their way of life and their patterns of thought are conditioned by their heritage. A widespread understanding of that heritage is essential in order that progress may be planned wisely. Hence, it has seemed desirable to gather into a single volume the story of Kalamazoo’s growth from a tiny fur-trading post in the wilderness to a modern metropolitan center.

The material for this book was gathered from a wide variety of sources. The older histories, often compiled as commercial ventures, have been most useful. The files of the Kalamazoo Gazette and other early newspapers have been an invaluable source of information. Letters, diaries, pamphlets, and other manuscript and printed materials also have been searched. Much has had to be omitted in order to keep the book within reasonable bounds. The author wishes to express his appreciation to the many persons who have been of help in preparing this volume. The Kalamazoo Public Library staff has been of great assistance in tracking down obscure items. Alexia Praus, Director of the Kalamazoo Public Museum, has rendered invaluable counsel. Mr. Praus, Dwight Curtenius, Mrs. Alfred Connable, Mrs. Grace Upjohn, and Mrs. Richard Gregg read the manuscript and gave many helpful suggestions. Dr. George Mallinson and Lawrence Brink at Western Michigan University have enabled the author to overcome many of the perplexing problems related to publication. Richard Gregg did the drawings which appear at the chapter headings and also designed the book. The pictures are from the collection at the Kalamazoo Public Library. The map for the dust jacket was copied from an original owned by Dr. E. Gifford Upjohn.

To all these, and to many others who have shared their knowledge of Kalamazoo’s past, the writer is deeply grateful. This is not a history of Kalamazoo families, and the names of individuals generally have been employed only when a given person was of outstanding importance or was of incidental importance to the narrative. This is the biography of a city, not of a man or a woman. Unlike the story of an individual’s life, this record of a city’s life does not end with the passing of the years. Instead, the city, now over a century and a quarter old, has taken on new vigor and has all the qualities of youth. There are just as many good old days in the future as there were in the past.

Willis F. Dunbar

Western Michigan University

September 1, 1959.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Design and drawings by Richard N. Gregg

Title page: The official flag of Kalamazoo

1. Typical dwellings of Kalamazoo Indians

2. The log cabins of early Kalamazoo

3. The Conestoga wagon, used by many pioneers in coming to Kalamazoo

4. The Kalamazoo House, earliest hotel in Kalamazoo

5. Fireman’s Hall, community center of the 1850’s

6. Kalamazoo Hall, built for Ladies Department of Kalamazoo College in 1859: corner of South Street and Oakland Drive

7. Camp of Sixteenth Michigan Infantry, near Fredericksburg, Virginia

8. The Ladies Library, South Park Street, built in 1879

9. The Kalamazoo Public Library, 1893-1958

10. The main building of Western State Normal School as it looked about 1910

11. The Michigan: one of the automobiles built in Kalamazoo in the early days of the automobile industry

12. The pavilion at Oakwood Park, Kalamazoo’s amusement park about 1920

13. The Civic Auditorium, built in the early years of the Great Depression

14. Amphibian tank, made during World War II by Ingersoll in Kalamazoo

15. The mall: first permanent pedestrian mall in the nation

16. A map illustrating the growth of Kalamazoo

1. THE FIRST PEOPLE

In the whole wide world there is only one Kalamazoo. The name is unique and distinctive. And it takes us back to the first people who lived here. Certainly the name is of Indian origin, but it has gone through quite an evolution. On their maps, the French called the Kalamazoo River the Muramek, the Malamek, or the Maramee. These names don’t sound like Kalamazoo. But in a British report on the route followed by explorers to reach Fort St. Joseph at Niles, in 1772, there is a reference to the Reccanamazoo River, which is getting closer. That same report, however, says it also is called the Pusawpaca Sippy or Iron Mine River. Early settlers found bog iron within the limits of the present city, so we may assume that the British report represented an anglicized version of an Indian word which referred to iron. In later records, the river is called by a variety of names. One of these, Ki-ka-ma-sung, meant boiling water. This may have referred to the eddies in the rapids of the river, or, as legend has it, to the race of the boiling kettle. A version of this legend is that the Indians had, each fall, a footrace from their village near Galesburg to the river, the goal being to run to the river and back before a pot of water began to boil. Then there is the yarn with a romantic angle, involving the promise of an Indian chief to give his daughter to the brave who could run a certain distance and bade before a pot of water boiled dry.

In any event, Kalamazoo is a word derived from the language of the Pottawatomi Indians who once inhabited this area. They were not, however, the first people who lived in Kalamazoo. The pioneers found in Kalamazoo County, mounds, earthworks, and garden beds about which the Indians who were living here at that time knew nothing. Similar remains have been found over a wide area in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It was believed for many years that these were the work of a distinctive race of highly civilized agriculturalists called moundbuilders who lived here in remote antiquity and were exterminated by the ancestors of the present Indians coming down from the north. This theory no longer is held by the leading American ethnologists. They believe the mound-builders probably were an earlier Indian people.

The best-known mound in Kalamazoo County is the one which still may be seen in Bronson Park in downtown Kalamazoo. It stood, when the country was first settled, in the midst of a plain covered by a scattering growth of burr-oak trees, an area called oak openings by the pioneers. An early examination of the mound by Henry Little indicated it had a diameter of fifty-eight feet at its base, a height of four feet nine inches, and was in the form of a perfect circle. There have been a number of excavations of this mound, but nothing of importance touching upon early Indian civilization has ever been found.

The mound was excavated in 1850 by A. J. Sheldon, and a bottle containing coins and newspaper clippings of the time was buried in it at that time. This bottle was found when the mound was opened in 1954. A newspaper remnant of the Kalamazoo Telegraph for June 28, 1850, was discovered, together with a number of coins. The coins later were stolen from the Kalamazoo Public Museum. A large new bottle, containing a variety of items representative of the life of Kalamazoo in 1954 was buried at the time the mound was closed.

There were a number of other mounds discovered by the first settlers in various parts of Kalamazoo County: two in Pavilion Township, three or more in Climax Township, and others in Comstock, Oshtemo, Cooper, and Richland Townships. No-one knows precisely the purpose for which these mounds were built and used.

Even more intriguing than the mounds were the garden-beds which were found in Kalamazoo County. They were of various forms: rectangular, triangular, circular, elliptical, and complex. Again, it is uncertain just what they were used for, the term garden-beds having been invented by those who found them as bang the most appropriate name. These beds covered as many as ten acres lying to the south of the mound in Bronson Park and were overgrown with burr-oak trees. They were found also in Schoolcraft, Climax, and Portage Townships. Earthworks, which appear to have been built for the purpose of fortification, also were found by the pioneers at a number of locations in Kalamazoo County.

Early French records tell that the Sioux Indians who later appear further west, invaded and occupied this region on many occasions. These records also tell of a tribe called the Mascoutens. De la Potherie, an early historian of New France, writing in 1690, tells of the Miamia of Muramek, indicating that Indians of the Miami tribe inhabited the region of Kalamazoo at that time. But by the time the white man began to penetrate this region, its people belonged to the Pottawatomi tribe, a branch of the great Indian people called Algonquin. They were closely attached to the French and fought in the wars against the English for the King of France. When, in spite of their efforts, the British were victorious, the Pottawatomi, together with a number of other tribes under the leadership of Chief Pontiac, sought to expel the Britishers from their country. Warriors from Kalamazoo probably took part in the capture of Fort St. Joseph and later participated in the siege of Detroit in 1763. It was all in vain, because the British were able to hold out and eventually force the Indians to make peace. During the American Revolution, the Indians were recruited for service with the British against the American patriots. The American settlers, coming across the mountains into the West, appeared to be a greater menace to the Indians than the British, who were chiefly interested in the fur trade and were inclined to leave the natives free to roam their hunting grounds.

The success of the patriots in the American Revolution did not immediately change the status of the Pottawatomi peoples in the Kalamazoo Valley. The British retained possession of Detroit and Mackinac Island until 1796, and the fur trade went on as before. Even after that date, British traders freely roamed the region and maintained their hold over the Indians. During the War of 1812, the Pottawatomi were again on the British side. One of the largest Pottawatomi villages in south-western Michigan was located at that time in what is now called Indian Fields, in Portage township. Here the women and children were kept while the braves went on the warpath against the Americans. The population of the village is reported to have been around six hundred. Some American captives may have been kept in this village.

When the treaty of peace which followed the War of 1812 left this region still in American hands, the Pottawatomi appear to have accepted the fact without bitterness. Perhaps by that time they were used to defeat. The first white settlers all attest the cordiality and friendliness with which the natives received them.

What was Indian life like in the Kalamazoo region before the white settlers came? Many of the ideas of the Indians which we have are stereotypes, derived from seeing Western movies and reading stories about the Plains Indians. We think of the Indian as a bronze-skinned individual, wearing a feathered head-dress, mounted on a horse or pony and armed with a bow and arrow. We fancy him living in a tepee in those infrequent moments when he was not on horseback. And we think of his chief occupation as that of making war against the white man. Most of these stereotyped ideas are false, at least insofar as they apply to the Indians of this region. They did not fight on horseback. They did not live in tepees. They did not wear a feathered head dress, at least not very often. And they were more often friendly than hostile to the white men who first came among them.

Their lives were simpler in many ways than ours, yet in others they were more complex. They were intimately concerned with the struggle for the basic essentials of life—food, clothing, and shelter—which we largely take for granted. They used no money, hence could not buy and sell. Each family had to look out for itself, although there is evidence of much kindliness in freely sharing with less fortunate families of the same tribe. There was no concept of land ownership. The woods and the waters belonged to all alike. A bit of land was the property of a family only while it was being used to grow a crop. The next year, the same land might be used by another family.

The Indians of Michigan did not build permanent homes, one reason being that they moved around so much in search of food. Perhaps another was that an Indian village became intolerably filthy after it had been inhabited for a short time, for the Indians had no conception of sanitation. They constructed their shelters, called wigwams by placing saplings in the ground and bending over the tops, then covering them with bark, grass matting, or boughs. Sometimes these habitations were built large enough for six to eight people.

Food was obtained by hunting, fishing, gathering wild fruit and berries in season, utilizing the sap of maple trees, and cultivating fields of com, beans, peas, and pumpkins. The men did the hunting and fishing, but all the other work of obtaining and preparing food was women’s work. Each tribe supplied its own wants, save for tobacco. A special tribe called Tobacco Indians cultivated this plant in present-day Ontario and supplied all the Great Lakes tribes with the tobacco leaves. The Indians were improvident, gorging themselves in time of plenty and almost starving at other times. They did make some effort to lay aside supplies by burying corn in pits and drying meat. They had no domesticated animals, except the dog, hence dairy products were unknown to them.

Not many clothes were worn, even in the coldest weather. The skins of animals were used to supply covering for the feet as well as the body. The head was left uncovered. Sometimes the men painted their bodies and faces with dyes made from plants, especially before taking the war-path. Red was the favorite color.

The families lived in villages varying in size, but rarely exceeding a few hundred persons. Each Indian tribe considered itself supreme in its own territory and if others intruded there was apt to be war. The government of a tribe was entrusted to a chief and a council. The power of the chief depended upon his own abilities and the prestige he had earned as a warrior and an orator. War among the Indians, before the white man came was no more common than it was in Europe during the Middle Ages. Like feudal knights, the Indian warrior was more interested in war as a means of demonstrating personal bravery than advancing the power of the tribe. The Indians were cruel, but their cruelty cannot be compared to the refined and excruciating tortures inflicted upon victims of religious fanaticism in Europe in the same age. Although scalps were sometimes collected as trophies by the Indians, the practice of taking scalps was encouraged and commercialized by the whites, who adopted the practice of paying the Indians for enemy scalps.

Contrary to the notions which many people have, the white settlers did not just move in and help themselves to the Indian hunting-grounds. Until 1807, all of Michigan except small areas around Detroit and Sault Ste. Marie belonged to the Indians. The government recognized that the Indians owned the land, much as it now recognizes land ownership by the whites. There were some differences, however. Neither the United States government nor the government of Michigan Territory attempted to govern the Indian lands. The Indians, such as the Pottawatomi constituted a nation within a nation. Negotiations for the purchase of their lands were carried on through the State Department and agreements to buy and sell were made in the form of treaties which required Senate ratification, the same as treaties with foreign powers.

What is now Michigan was inhabited thinly by the Indians. There probably were no more than 15,000 natives in the present State of Michigan when the White man first came. At first there seemed to be plenty of room for both races. The Indians did not need all their lands. And so, government agents began to dicker with tribal leaders for the purchase of large tracts. William Hull, first governor of Michigan Territory, purchased for the United States the first large piece of Michigan lands in 1807. Two other treaties, signed in 1817 and 1819 transferred the title to a large portion of the eastern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula to the United States. In 1821, Governor Lewis Cass and Solomon Sibley of Detroit negotiated with several Indian tribes, including the Pottawatomi, the Treaty of Chicago. By this Treaty, all the territory lying south of the Grand River, including Kalamazoo County, came into the possession of the United States, except for five small areas reserved for the Indians.

The usual practice in making these treaties was to get on the right side of the natives by giving them cheap trinkets; next, to get the chiefs drunk on cheap firewater, and then to negotiate a treaty. There is no reason to suppose the procedure at Chicago in 1821 differed from that pattern. At any rate the Indians accepted $5,000 annually for twenty years, plus $1,000 a year to support a teacher and a blacksmith as payment for these vast rich lands.

One of the five reservations set aside in the Treaty of Chicago for the Indians included the present site of the city of Kalamazoo. It was designated in the Treaty as the Match-e-be-nash-e-wish reserve. Six years later, the process of squeezing out the Indians led to another treaty, under which the Pottawatomi agreed to exchange all their scattered reservations for one consolidated reservation called Nottawasepee. This consisted of 115 sections of land—73,600 acres—lying in the southern part of Kalamazoo County and in St. Joseph County. Thus in 1827, the site of Kalamazoo came into the possession of the United States government. Before it could be sold, however, it had to be surveyed. A man named John Mullett surveyed Kalamazoo Township in 1827. The old Indian reservation was surveyed by Orange Risdon in June, 1829, the same month that Titus Bronson arrived—Kalamazoo’s first settler.

Treaty followed upon treaty as the tide of pioneers flowed into Michigan in the 1830’s. Apparently the Indians despaired of making any forceable resistance. There was an attempted Indian uprising on the Illinois-Wisconsin frontier in 1832 called Black Hawk’s War, but it was easily suppressed. Shorn of their last hope of holding on to their lands, the Indians signed another Treaty at Chicago in 1833, agreeing to move west of the Mississippi. There was a huge area marked on most maps at the time The Great American Desert, and the Indians were promised possession of this land in perpetuity. For their remaining five million acres of land in Lower Michigan, the Indians got gifts such as military trappings, baubles, and trinkets to the extent of $10,000. They were to be allowed to stay until 1835. When that year came they were given a five year extension. But 1840 was the deadline.

Some interesting stories have survived concerning relations of the Indians and the whites while Kalamazoo County was filling up with pioneers and before the Indians were moved out. It is the universal comment that by and large they treated the whites with kindness and that they were hospitable in spite of all the provocation to act otherwise. They lived on deer, which were plentiful, on other game, such as raccoon and muskrats, on the corn which they planted, and on the blueberries, blackberries, and other fruits that grew wild. They often appeared in the stores and cabins of the settlers. Squaws with their papooses, as well as the Indian men, would come in, unceremoniously sit on the floor, and watch what went on without a word. They turned out en masse for any excitement, such as horse-racing or circuses. They carried on a lively trade with the settlers, offering cranberries, maple sugar, deer-skins, moccasins, and wild fruits in exchange for flour, salt, tobacco, lead, and—of course—whisky. The latter was of poor quality, consisting of a small amount of the real stuff, watered down.

According to the testimony of pioneers, the local chief, a fellow named Sag-e-maw, was a most remarkable man. He had a great deal of common sense, and was known for his integrity and dignity. In his speeches to his own people, he displayed the qualities of a great orator, even though the settlers couldn’t understand what he was saying. One pioneer testified that he was the only Indian he ever saw who was attentive to his squaw. When they came to a store in Schoolcraft, the chief would help her off her pony, and when they were ready to leave, he would place his hand on the ground, she would place one foot in it, and he would lift her with apparent ease on to the back of the pony. He had the reputation of always paying his debts.

When 1840 came around, the thankless task of rounding up the Indians was given to a man named Rice. He is said to have performed his task with fidelity and the utmost regard for the Indians. Kalamazoo was the rendezvous for a large group starting west. The Indians were encamped for several days north of where the New York Central station now stands. They visited with local residents, many of whom had developed a warm friendship for individual Indians. From the north and the west they assembled for the march beyond the Mississippi. Their tents and household goods were loaded on the backs of ponies. The sick and the aged also were carried on ponies. Men, women, and children, accompanied by dogs, followed on foot. Papooses were carried on the backs of the squaws. The Indians were reluctant to leave the lakes, woods, and oak openings which had been the home of their ancestors. They were apprehensive of the danger from the Sioux tribe in the area assigned to them. But they had no recourse.

We may picture them as they started slowly on their trek to the West, a long line of sad and lonely people. Along the route they passed the home of Judge Epaphroditus Ransom, a prominent Kalamazoo man who often had befriended them in their dealings with the government. As they passed by they all raised their hands in a last token of respect and farewell.

2. FUR TRADE ON THE KEKALAMASOE

Who was the first white man to visit Kalamazoo? No-one knows for certain, but it almost surely was a Frenchman. For the French were the Europeans who first ventured into the great American west by way of the St. Lawrence river, its tributary steams, and the Great Lakes. However it was the upper lakes region that they first visited in the early years of the seventeenth century. Only later did they penetrate what is now the lower peninsula of Michigan.

There is a strong probability that the first white man to look upon the land and waters within Kalamazoo County was the noted French explorer Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle. The date was late March or early April in the year 1680. La Salle was an ambitious young Frenchman who sold the King of France, Louis XIV, on the idea of exploring the Mississippi River to its mouth and establishing a string of forts in the interior of America to keep out English or other intruders. Although the King was agreeable to La Salle’s proposal, he told the young man he must finance the project himself. La Salle determined to do this by buying fur in quantity in the West and gaining a handsome profit therefrom. To this end he had a sailing vessel called the Griffin constructed at Niagara, the first sailing ship to navigate the Great Lakes. Setting out in 1679, the Griffin braved the uncharted waters of Lake Erie, the Detroit River, and Lake St. Clair, Huron, and Michigan to reach what is now Green Bay, in Wisconsin. There she was loaded with furs and set sail for the return trip to the east. Before the ship departed, La Salle instructed her captain to bring his vessel back to the mouth of the St. Joseph River in lower Michigan for more furs. The little ship was never heard from again, and her fate remains a mystery, although wreckage that may have come from the Griffin has been found in a number of places.

To prepare for the ship’s return and to gather the furs with which