USA > Michigan > Cass County > A twentieth century history of Cass County, Michigan > Part 19
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By this act of 1846 the Michigan Central Railroad Company, com- posed of private individuals, was incorporated. At the same time a transfer of all the state's equity and control of the Central Railroad was made to the new corporation for the consideration of two million
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dollars. The charter required the new company to follow substantially the route originally decided upon, but instead of specifying that the mouth of the St. Joseph should be the western terminus, allowed the company to build from Kalamazoo "to some point in the state of Michi- gan on or near Lake Michigan which shall be accessible to steamboats on said lake, and thence to some point on the southern boundary line of Michigan"; the men who composed the company insisting on the latter provision in order that they might have a choice of destination.
The object of the company was to project their line across the northern portion of Indiana and plant its western terminus at Chicago. The story of the intense rivalry between the Michigan Central and the Michigan Southern in their struggle to be the first to accomplish this end is not pertinent here. But the change of the objective point from St. Joseph to Chicago resulted in diverting the course of the line direct from Kalamazoo to New Buffalo (the terminus of the Michigan char- ter) and thus crossing the northwest corner of Cass county. Had the original plan been carried out, Cass county would have been without railroad connection for a number of years longer.
But now, in the haste to construct the line, the new company, as soon as the transfer had been effected, surveyed a route to New Buffalo and at once pushed the work of construction as far as the Michigan charter would carry it. The road was completed through this county as far as Niles by October 7. 1848, and in the spring of the following year New Buffalo was reached. The conflicting interests of the two rival railroads and the legislatures of the states through which the lines were to pass delayed the completion of the Michigan Central across Indiana. But the line was opened to Michigan City in the winter of 1851-52, and in the following spring was completed to Chicago.
Had the plans contemplated by the state been carried out, the Michigan Southern would have been constructed along the southern border of the state and hence through Cass county. But it was seen fit to turn this line south from White Pigeon, and thence was constructed across Northern Indiana.
The first constitution of Michigan had expressly affirmed the pro- priety of internal improvements being undertaken by the state and paid for out of the public funds or public lands. The unhappy results that followed the projection and partial construction of the Central and Southern railroads under state auspices worked a complete reversal of public opinion on this policy. Accordingly the constitution of 1850
HISTORY OF CASS COUNTY
contained a provision prohibiting the state from contributing to or otherwise engaging in any such forms of internal improvements.
Though the people as a state were thus forbidden to construct rail- roads, it was understood that smaller corporate units of towns and cities were not affected by the constitutional provisions. After the Civil war for several years, there passed over the country a wave of popular activity and participation in railroad construction. Towns, villages and counties, not to mention hundreds of private citizens, not only in this state but in many states of the middle west, voted generous subscrip- tions or "bonuses" to railroad enterprises, many of which began and ended their existence in the fertile brains of the promoters. This move- ment had a vital connection with Cass county's welfare, and its ulti- mate results may be said to have given the county two of its railroad lines.
By the beginning of the seventies the towns and cities of the state had voted to various railroad companies subscriptions aggregating sev- eral millions of dollars. Individuals had given perhaps as much more. Now followed a decision of the state supreme court declaring that the act under which the voting had taken place was unconstitutional ; hence these minor civil corporations could not obligate themselves by contri- butions to railroad construction any more than the state itself could. This was the final phase of internal improvements under public direc- tion or support. So much history of the matter is necessary to a proper understanding of the manner in which the "Air Line" and the Penin- sular, now Grand Trunk, railroads were constructed through Cass county.
LaGrange township alone, with the prospective benefits of two railroads before it, had voted thirty thousand dollars of bonds to the two projected roads. But fortunately these bonds, as was true of the bonds of other townships in the county, were still in the keeping of the state treasurer at the time the decision of the supreme court was given. Soon after the decision was made known a majority of the citizens of the various townships voted to recall the bonds and prevent their being surrendered to the railroad companies and hence to individual purchas- ers. The state treasurer, however, refused to return the bonds until the supreme court, in behalf of LaGrange township, issued a mandamus compelling the state treasurer to restore the bonds. In the case of some townships of the state, the bonds had already passed into the financial markets, and in such instances the townships were obliged to pay their subscriptions.
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The Air Line branch of the Michigan Central which now crosses Cass county nearly centrally from west to east was projected almost entirely by local capital and enterprise, the corporate name being the Michigan Air Line Railroad Company. The people of the counties of Cass. St. Joseph, Calhoun and Jackson were the ones most vitally in- terested. Jackson county subscribed nearly two hundred thousand dol- lars to the undertaking and the principal officers of the original organi- zation were citizens of Jackson. The line was opened to travel from Jackson to Homer in the summer of 1870, to Three Rivers in the autumn of the same year, and was completed to Niles in February, 1871. Almost coincident with the completion of the road it was leased to the Michigan Central Railroad Company, and soon became the property of that com- pany. The first regular passenger train over this road was run through Cass county on January 16, 1871.
The late Mr. S. T. Read. of Cassopolis, has been given the credit for suggesting to the president of the Canadian Railroad the scheme for extending that line from its western Canadian terminus at Port Huron across the peninsula of Michigan to a terminal in the com- mercial metropolis of Chicago. The Grand Trunk Railroad was built, and due to the public-spirited and persistent efforts of Mr. Read the line passed through central Cass county and the county seat. The people of the county liberally supported the enterprise, contributing in cash subscriptions and donations of rights of way to the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.
The track was completed to Cassopolis from the east on February 9. 1871, and in the course of the same year the line was extended to Valparaiso, Indiana, and subsequently to Chicago.
The Grand Trunk Railroad in the United States is a patchwork of smaller lines and extensions of various date. The first line was con- structed under a charter given to the Port Huron and Lake Michigan Railroad Company in 1847. In 1855 the Port Huron and Milwaukee Railroad Company was chartered, and not long afterward was amal- gamated with the first-named organization. October 3, 1865, the Peninsular Railroad Company was chartered to construct a railroad be- tween Lansing and Battle Creek. January 3, 1868, the Peninsular Rail- road Extension Company was chartered for the extension of a line from Battle Creek to the Indiana state line. These two companies were con- solidated as the Peninsular Railway Company. Numerous other con-
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solidations and changes preceded the final organization, in April, 1880, of the Chicago and Grand Trunk Railway Company.
In the early eighties the Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago & St. Louis, popularly known as the "Big Four," was constructed between Niles and Elkhart. This route passed through the southwestern corner of Cass county, in Milton township, but as only a. signal station called Truitt has been established on that section of the line, the "Big Four" is not a Cass county road in the same relation as the Michigan Central, with the Air Line branch and the Grand Trunk.
Although at the date of this compilation Cass county's means of communication do not include electric lines, the course of development will soon reach this stage, and it is appropriate to describe the present status of this subject.
About 1901 the "Eastern and Northwestern Railroad Company" was formed by a group of capitalists with headquarters in Chicago. They proposed a railroad from Benton Harbor to Toledo, entering Cass county at the northwest and leaving it about the middle of Newberg township on the east, cutting the existing lines about at right angles. The fine of original survey was run three miles to the north of Cassopolis.
The citizens of that village, alive to the possible loss of another railroad, at once made efforts to bring the road through the county seat. The terms asked by the promoters were a right of way for the distance of two and a half miles and land for depot site. The Cass- opolis citizens complied. and the road was to be in operation as far as Dowagiac by May, 1902, and the entire line completed by July, 1903. A large part of the grading was done, indeed in this respect the line is practically complete to Jamestown in Penn township, Cass county, but the financial backing failed before the rest of the construction was finished, and the grades and cuts are all that Cass county so far has to show for the enterprise.
But tentative negotiations are in progress, according to a plan to utilize this route for an electric road. The network of interurban elec- tric lines is certain to inclose Cass county within a few years. To the south there is a line of electric communication almost continuous be- tween Michigan City and Toledo. On the west a branch of the same system touches Niles, Berrien Springs and Benton Harbor, Berrien county. Kalamazoo is another center for the radiation of these roads. As this form of intercommunication in the middle west is the product
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of little more than a decade, it is not unreasonable to expect an equally phenomenal increase with the succeeding ten years.
POSTAL SERVICE.
No phase of the general subject of communication is of more vital interest to the people than postal facilities. The desire to know what is going on in the world outside the circle of immediate acquaintance is as deep-seated as it is wholesome, and the isolation from friends and relatives and the settled parts of the country was one of the severest privations connected with settlement on the frontier. In truth there was a time in most such communities when news-if such it could be called when it often was very old when it reached the hearers-had no reg- ular lines of dissemination and was carried only by the chance trav- eler. All pioneer communities have experienced such a situation in some degree, and the early settlers of Cass county had little definite connection with the outside world, although living in a comparatively modern age and only a few years before the invention of the telegraph.
Accordingly one of the first improvements sought after actual home and shelter and means of subsistence were provided was a postal serv- ice, such as all the settlers had been familiar with in their former homes in the more settled regions. We have seen how the government early made provision for the establishment of a great post road from the east to the west. But the actual transportation and distribution of mail was a very uncertain matter for many years, and depended largely on the provision that each community could make for that purpose. In the early days a mail route was established between Fort Wayne and Niles. The mail was at first carried once in four weeks, then once every two weeks. This mail was carried by a character known as "Old Hall," who bestrode one horse while the mail bags were carried on a horse that he led. At Niles the mail for all the surrounding country was distrib- uted, the various communities in Cass county each receiving it by special carriers. Some convenient settler's cabin was selected as the postoffice, and there the neighbors would gather to receive a chance letter or hear the reading of a newspaper brought in by the last mail. The history of many of these early postoffices is told in the chapter on the centers of population.
Letters were a luxury in pioneer times. They were written on foolscap paper and so folded that one side was left blank, so as to form its own envelope, it being sealed with wax or a wafer. This latter cus-
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tom was followed for many years, and some of these sheets folded ac- cording to the usual manner and with some of the wax of the seal still adhering to them, are still to be found in the county.
It was perhaps well that the pioneer could not foresee the con- veniences that his twentieth century descendant enjoys in the way of postal facilities ; he might have felt his deprivations more severely had he known that in 1906 the rural mail routes, radiating in every direction and approaching within convenient distance of every home in the county, would be delivering packages, letters and metropolitan dailies once each day and with greater regularity and punctuality than was the case in the large eastern towns of his time.
TELEPHONES.
To understand the development that has taken place in the means of communication it is not necessary to go back beyond the memory of the present generation. As the result of successful experiments Mr. Alex. Grahanı Bell exhibited at the Centennial exposition in Phil- adelphia in 1876 an invention which was described by a standard en- cyclopedia published in 1877 as an instrument for the "telegraphic trans- mission of articulate sounds." The article further goes on to state as the climax of the wonderful discovery that "we may confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making voice and spoken words audible through the electric wire to an ear hundreds of miles distant." And in 1906 there is probably not a person in Cass county who does not at least know of the telephone, and in hundreds of rural homes and in nearly every city and village residence and business house will be found one of these instruments, so necessary to modern life. Various telephone and telegraph companies are now operating their lines in and through this county, and the news of the Russian crisis comes to every village as soon after the occurrence as in former days a report concerning a trial at Cassopolis would reach the outlying districts of the county.
From the foregoing it appears that the world is coming to be all of a piece. Once every little community could live by itself, make its own clothes, wagons, tools, and all the articles necessary for its exist- ence. But this view of self-dependence and isolation either in man or in the community is now thoroughly discredited. With the coming of railroad, telegraph, telephone, etc., closer relations were established, and individuals, communities and states have become dependent on each other.
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CHAPTER XII.
INDUSTRIES AND FINANCE.
That familiar hero of juvenile fiction, Robinson Crusoe, after being cast upon his desert island, was compelled to build his own shelter, to make his own clothes, to fashion many of his implements and his house- hold utensils, to cultivate the soil and raise and prepare all things need- ful for his bodily sustenance, to enact for his own guidance all his laws and rules of conduct, and to be his own army for protection against the cannibals. Such a type of all-around man, jack-of-all-trades, self-suffi- cient and prepared for all the uses and adversities of the world, was at one time considered the proper ideal by which each person should fashion his life.
But such individualism is now seen to be exceedingly primitive. and instead of making man more independent really puts him more abjectly in dependence on all the humbler wants and necessities which are at the base of the higher life. Society as now organized, and in its general tendencies toward the working out of the problems of human destiny, divides into numerous occupations the work of the world. specializing it for each class of workers, and thereby leaves each of us the greater liberty to work out our individuality to its highest possi- bilities.
The men and women who settled Cass county in the twenties and thirties of the last century were in a measure Crusoes, in that most of the necessities of life, whether for eating, wearing or for performing the work of the field and household, were home products. Planted in the depth of a great wilderness, remote from mills and often unattended by craftsmen, the men and women who laid here the foundations of civilized society were. of necessity, their own artisans to a very large extent, and every home was a factory. Many a farmer or farmer's son. becoming skilled in some particular trade, was enabled thereby to add substantially to the family income.
The conversion of raw material into forms suitable for the uses of mankind was undertaken immediately upon the arrival of the first
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permanent white settlers, who, with few tools but an ax. hastily con- structed a rude cabin of logs and fashioned a few primitive articles for domestie use, such as tables, benches, heds, and other furnishings of immediate necessity.
Next to shelter and foodstuffs clothing was the issue of paramount importance to the hardy pioneers, and in the division of labor this in- dustry was left to the women. Every cabin was flanked by its patch of fax. and the planter who did not possess a few sheep had to trade with his neighbor for wool. From these raw materials the old-fashioned housewife was expected to produce clothing for the family and linen for the bed and table. The full grown flax was pulled up and spread out on the ground to rot in the rain and dew. after which it was thoroughly broken, by the ohler boys, if there were any, with the vigorous use of the flax-brake, then put through a softening process called "scutching." and a separating process called "hackling." which left ready for the spinstress two fabrics, tow and thread fiber.
By the use of the little spinning wheel, proficiency in the handling of which was for the girls a test of advancing womanhood, the fiber. or lint, was made into a fine, strong thread called warp, and the tow into a coarser thread used as filling. These were woven together on a hand loom, and from the tow-linen produced was made the summer wear for the family, the females usually preferring to color theirs with home-made dyestuff to suit their taste, while the less pretentious men folks were satisfied to take it as it came from the loom. When the wool was brought in, the good mother and her daughters, after thor- oughly cleansing or scouring it by washing, shaped it into convenient rolls by the aid of a pair of hand-cards provided for that purpose and spun on the big wheel into yarn filling (sometimes used for knitting stockings, mittens and comforters), which. when woven with linen warp, made the "linsey-woolsey" of the good old days. or. if woven with cotton warp. resulted in the fabric known as "jeans." The former. suitably dyed, was in general use as a strong, warm and handsome text- ure for feminine apparel, and the latter. colored with butternut juice. was tailored by the women for the men's wear.
As commerce with other parts of the United States increased. cotton became a more generally used material. But during the height of the abolition movement, which, as we know, had some very strong advocates in Cass county, a prejudice arose against the use of any material made by slave labor, although only two or three instances are
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recorded of persons who absolutely refused to wear garments that contained any part cotton.
For footwear the wandering cobbler, who traveled from house to house, was relied upon to fashion boots and shoes from the home- tanned hides, or moccasins were procured from the Indians. Occa- sionally the shoemakers would not get around until after snowfall, and many a venerable grandsire can tell of going barefooted to his chores with snow on the ground. A well prepared coonskin made a very warm and equally unsightly cap. Coonskins also formed a kind of currency of the woods. the pelt being considered as good as gold and accepted in exchange for all commodities.
Properly selected rye straws were woven by the women into bon- nets for themselves and hats for their masters. The women also fash- ioned for themselves curiously wrought sunbonnets of brightly-colored goods shaped over pasteboard strips with fluted and ruffled capes falling behind over the shoulders. The manufacture of quilts gave oppor- tunity for social gatherings when there were neighbors close enough to get back home before chore time, and the quilting ranked along with the huskings, log-rollings and house-raisings among the primitive society functions of the early days. The industries of the homestead did not include the preservation of fruits and vegetables, save to a small extent by drying, but meats were preserved in various ways; lye hominy or hulled corn was a regular institution, and some other food articles were occasionally laid by for winter, thus forming the beginnings of the packing and canning industries of later times.
Prior to the advent of cabinet makers the settlers, perforce, in- cluded that trade among their accomplishments, and made their own hed- steads, tables, cupboards and chairs. For bedsteads an oak hutt, about eight feet long and of sufficient diameter, was split into rails and posts. a shorter log was split up for slats, and the pieces selected were dressed down with the drawknife and fitted together with the axe. Two rails were used for each side and three for each end, the rounded ends of the slats being driven into auger holes in the rails, and the four high corner-posts were tied together at the tops with strong cords, from which curtains might be suspended if desired. Even less pretentious forms have been described. and, of course, each article of furniture would be likely to vary according to the ingenuity and skill of the maker. In the more fortunate homes were bedsteads with turned posts. square rails and cords in place of slats, a feather bed surmounted the
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"straw tick," and with plenty of "kiver." such a lodgment was com- fortable on the coldest winter night. There was also the trundle bed. a low bed that could be pushed under the large bed, where it remained during the day, and was pulled out for the smaller children's use at night.
With equal skill a table was constructed by pinning two thin oak clapboards, smoothed with a sharp ax on the upper side, to cross-pieces set on four strong legs, the surface of the table being about four feet by six. This type also varied. Three-legged stools were made in a similar simple manner. Pegs driven in auger holes in the logs of the wall supported shelves, and on others was hung the limited wardrobe of the family. A few other pegs, or, perhaps, a pair of deer horns formed a rack on which were suspended the rifle and powder horn, al- ways found in every pioneer cabin.
Fortunately, among the early settlers there was here and there a craftsman who could be called upon by his neighbors to perform the special form of labor for which his skill fitted him. A number of such persons have been mentioned in former chapters. It was not usual during the first years of the county's history for an artisan to depend entirely on his trade. There was not sufficient demand for his services. He had his claim and cultivated the ground just as the other settlers. and during the winter season or the interims of farm labor, he was ready to ply his trade.
As we have seen, certain forms of manufacturing, such as those represented in the sawmill and the grist mill, were introduced very soon after the settlement of the county began. These two particular institu- tions supplied the immediate necessities of life, and no community could progress very far without them. Other forms of manufacturing soon came in, and at an early date manufacturing interests formed a distinct part of the industrial affairs of the county.
At Cassopolis, the name of Abram Tietsort, Jr., is first and most prominently associated with a trade. The log building in which he did cabinet making for the villagers was located on the banks of Stone lake, just out of the village site. He made various articles of furniture for the pioneer homes, and now and then was called upon to furnish a plain and simple coffin: for death was not an unknown visitor to the early community.
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