as much promise in this period were Comstock, Augusta and Galesburg, Barry and Grass Lake.

Battle Creek, notwithstanding its excellent water power and the early eager rivalry to secure control of it, appears to have been slow in securing mills, and its settlement in this period was correspondingly tardy. A census of the male inhabitants said to have been taken by a contemporary in 1835 numbered about fifteen.177 The village was comparatively late in platting (1836) and it saw no frame house erected until the last year of the period.178 A curious lack of enterprize is shown so late as 1845 by the apparent necessity, if true, of raising by subscription from the citizens a sufficient fund to start a newspaper.179 A somewhat better impression is gained from the account given by Blois for 1838, crediting the village with a sawmill, two gristmills, two taverns, six stores, a saddlery, a cabinet manufactory, two smitheries, several machine shops and a banking association.180 is worthy of note in view of the prominent part taken later by Battle Creek as a station on the "underground railroad," that the Quakers appear to have formed a considerable part of its population as early as 1836-37.181

It

180. Gazetteer of Michigan, 251. 181. History of Calhoun County (1877), Mich. Hist. Colls., XXXVIII, 284. They appear to have had a church there in 1843. The State organ of the Michigan Abolitionists was printed there, its editor being the resident agent for the "underground railroad." The antislavery sentiment was strong throughout the county. History of Calhoun County, 23-24.

At Albion, though the lands covering the water power were purchased early, mills and the accompanying village beginnings apparently did not materialize until 1836. The impulse of 1836 was due to the Albion Company, whose leading spirit came from Oswego County, New York.182 That year saw the first frame house.183 Mills were built, and in 1838 the village with some forty dwellings appears to have been in about the same stage of growth as Battle Creek.184 Its position a mile and a half south of the Territorial Road was an initial handicap, but it was on the surveyed road from Marshall to Monroe and also on the located route of the Central Railroad. Albion College is said to have had beginnings in neighboring settlements as early as 1835 but seems not to have been a considerable influence at Albion until 1839;185 its establishment appears to have been largely due to the patronage of the Albion Company.186

Comstock, on the river four miles east of Kalamazoo, is a type of the village founded and fostered by the individual pioneer capitalist. It was platted as early as 1831, and had high grade business management and extensive capital in its service. Its founder, Gen. Horace H. Comstock of Cooperstown, New York, 182. Mich. Hist. Colls., XXXVIII, 212.

183. Ibid., XXXVIII, 213.

184. Blois, Gazetteer, 247.

185. Mich. Hist. Colls., II, 205; McLaughlin, Higher Education in Michigan, 145. It appears not to have been opened there until 1843.

186.

187.

Mich. Hist. Colls., XXXVIII, 212.

His wife was related closely to James Fenimore Cooper, whose Oak-Openings is said to have resulted from an interest in the Kalamazoo Valley initiated by the relationship.

was interested financially in a number of enterprizes, among them the settlements at Otsego and at the mouth of the Kalamazoo.188 Had the village been successful in its struggles with Kalamazoo for the county seat it might well have overshadowed that village and become itself the present-day city.189 Seven years of growth left it with little more than the mills and the improvements made by its founder.190

Augusta and Galesburg were barely beginning in 1837. Augusta, twelve miles east of Kalamazoo, had a tavern, two sawmills and several dwellings in 1838. It received its initial impulse from the Augusta Company in 1836.191 Galesburg was platted in 1837.192 From six to nine miles on either side of Jackson at power sites and on the Territorial Road were Leoni, or Grass Lake postoffice, and Barry, each with a sawmill and a couple of stores.193

Several influences operated to deflect settlement from this central line of the river and road. They were principally, (1) the prairie settlements, (2) the still unoccupied openings and plains, (3) the grazing lands on the "wet prairies" and in the creek bottoms, (4) 188. Thomas, History of Allegan County, 47. 189. Mich. Hist. Colls., V, 362.

190. Blois, Gazetteer, 266.

191. Mich. Hist. Colls., V, 357, 386; History of Kalamazoo County (1880), 492; Blois, Gazetteer, 249. The name is from Augusta, Maine, the home of a leading member of the company.

192. History of Kalamazoo County (1880), 377.

193. Blois, Gazetteer, 250, 311; Mich. Hist Colls., V, 347. Grass

Lake was nearly as old as Jackson. The original settlement was about a mile west of the present site, being removed to its present place by the establishment of the depot there on the Central Railroad in 1842.

power sites on tributary streams, (5) the Chicago Road, and (6) the rising value and scarcity of good land untaken along the Kalamazoo River.

In Kalamazoo County, newly arriving immigrants chose first the best available land near the established prairie centers of settlement. It is said that of the places regularly visited by a pioneer preacher in 1833 whose field included ten settlements in that county, only two were not on the prairies, and those two were on the river at Kalamazoo and Comstock.194 The attraction of the settlements on Prairie Ronde and Gourdneck prairies influenced immigration especially from the states immediately south of Michigan, although by 1835 there seem to have been a great many Vermont immigrants.195 As noted above, the settlement on Prairie Ronde secured a strong foothold early. The prairie is mentioned in the Detroit Free Press of September 13, 1832, as "largely settled," and notice is taken of the section of timber near its center. In 1833 the village of Schoolcraft forming on the eastern border of this woodland was the center of a neighboring prairie population said to have numbered about three hundred.196 Schoolcraft was platted in 1831, at about the same time as the larger river villages of this section and those on the Chicago Road. Inside of two years the land adjacent to the plat is said to have readily found buyers at $12 an acre in cash.197 In 1838 Blois credits the village with three stores, and mentions what was apparently a rival village just starting

194. Mich. Hist. Colls., II, 159.

195. Ibid., XXX, 457.

196. Ibid., XXVII, 449.

197. Mich. Hist. Colls., XXVII, 449; XXX, 453.

near the same site, called Charleston.198 The population of the township of Prairie Ronde in 1837 was 665, including an area equal to a Government township, while immediately east and north for an area four times as large, 1292 are recorded.199

Across the county northeast of Kalamazoo on Gull Prairie there was a village center apparently quite as large as that on Prairie Ronde. Blois mentions the village as Geloster, crediting it with four stores. 200 The population of the civil township including it (Richland), covering the two northeastern government townships, was in 1837, 720.201 The nucleus of this settlement was made by the "Kalamazoo Emigration Society of Michigan," which was formed in 1830 at Hudson, Ohio, near the Ohio home of Titus Bronson, founder of Kalamazoo, 202 The resolutions adopted by this society are worthy of note for the light they throw on the nature of the original Gull Prairie colony and as reflecting much the same educational, religious and social spirit as the "Constitution" of the later Vermont colony at Vermontville in Eaton County. Some of the resolutions are as follows:

"3. Christian principles, and the injunctions of the Gospel shall be adhered to generally; and as soon as a sufficient number of professing Christians shall have emigrated, a Congregational Church shall be organized 198. Gazetteer of Michigan, 262, 360.

199. Mich. Legislative Manual (1838), 71; Session Laws (1835-36), 75. This area contained the mill village of Vicksburg, which was also a prairie settlement. History of Kalama200 County (1880), 523.

200.

Gazetteer of Mich., 289.

201. Mich. Legislative Manual (1838), 71.

202. Northwestern Journal, March 31 and June 30, 1830.