Dowagiac Blog Info.
Janie Lynn Panagopoulos
Pandex@prodigy.net
http://www.JLPanagopoulos.com
Research information I found interesting concerning Dowagiac while doing research on A Faraway Home: An Orphan Train Story.
Ndowagayuk - Dowagiac (A foraging ground) is an interesting name and I found great appreciation that the community held onto that old Pottawatomie word and realized that during the time of settlement, it still had great meaning. (http://dowagiacchamber.com/3aa.htm - name meaning)
The Native American’s of the area are recorded back to the 1600s, and were mostly Pottawatomie. (http://www.answers.com/topic/potawatomi) It is recorded that when the first white setters in the area arrived they made count of over 42 Indian mounds, known today to have dated back to Michigan’s Hopewell culture, way before LaSalle made his epic trip by foot through the area. (http://www.michiganhistorymagazine.com/kids/pdfs/mittensept03.pdf - Hopewell Indian Lesson Plan) (LaSalle in Cass Co. http://www.nilesmi.com/city.html)
William Renesten, who was the first white settler in 1830, was quite a visionary when he built his carding mill and by 1833 a grist mill. Renesten could see the potential of the area and knew he had something going when all “new” roads were “first” carved through the wilderness to lead to Renesten’s mills. (http://www.antiquefishinglures.com/beekeeping.htm)
In 1834, Dennis Wright was the next settler to set up residence when he built the first sawmill in the area. This was the same year surveyors from the state followed the Grand River Indian Trail from Kalamazoo to Niles and decided this was the best trail to build a Stagecoach road opening the wilderness to stage travel in the area by 1836. (http://www.michiganhighways.org/listings/HistoricUS-016.html)
By 1842, Dowagiac consisted of 4 log cabins and one log school house built in 1840 and was the only school west of Detroit. Over the next few years, word of the Michigan Central Rail Road coming through Dowagiac was spread and by 1848 the town filed its first plat map and the first MCRR train made its way into the little settlement. On the Plat map, even today, you might notice a slightly irregular layout of the town, as it was platted to the diagonal direction of the railroad tracks. The original plan was to have Main Street, not Front Street as the central roadway. That is why, if you view the original Plat you might notice that Main Street was planned to be considerably wider then Front Street. http://www.michiganrailroads.com/MichRRs/Railroads/CMHomePage.htm
(Check your local library for Dowagiac Plat maps)
Over the next decade Dowagiac grew both in population and in physical size. By 1853 the settlement had grown to a population of 300 and by 1855 it doubled to 608.
In 1853, the town of Dowagiac could boast of five drygood stores, 4 grocery stores, 2 pharmacies, 2 taverns, 2 shoe repair shops and one shoe store, 1 sewing shop, 1 cainet shop, 2 blacksmith’s 2 carpentry shops and 1 Baptist Church.
With all the improvements of carving a settlement out of the wilderness,
Dowagiac attorney J. B. Clarke’s sister, Sara Jane Clarke (a.k.a. Grace Greenwood), a popular writer and poet of the time, came to visit her brother in Dowagiac in 1858. According to an article she wrote for the Philadelphia Evening Post she was not the least bit impressed with Dowagiac.
Greenwood wrote in the article her concern for her brother and the location he had chosen to call home. She couldn’t understand how anyone could live in such a primitive state with tree stumps still standing in the middle of road ways and where people don’t even plant a shade tree near their door or in their yard and the grassless ground makes the whitewashed houses look like Roc eggs on the desert sand.
Greenwood’s vile attack, of course, was written through the viewpoint of a city woman who had traveled the world, and she was also a women’s rights reformist and an active abolitionist, someone who was used to speaking her mind and hurling arrows in any direction she could find an audience for her opinions. Greenwood was soon fired from a writing job later that year for articles that expressed “too” many of her opinions and not enough understanding and fact.
The reformer Greenwood’s attitude’s and public opinions of Dowagiac, however, soon got back to the citizens of the little village of Dowagiac, where instead of taking insult and offense, they looked upon it as an opportunity to organize and move forward, developing ways to make the little village more “civilized” and settled. Record shows that during the spring of the following year 83 tree stumps were removed from the streets and grass, flowers and shade trees took root in the new and growing village. Speaking well of Dowagiac’s willingness to improve and the character of its residence.
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