Past and present of Shiawassee County, Michigan, historically; with biographical sketches, Part 3

Author:
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Lansing, Mich. : Hist. Pub.
Number of Pages: 580

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The year 1816, in which the first white trader in his bark canoe made his first voyage up the Shiawassee river, has been referred to as the date that divided the occupation of the county between the two races. That event really was, of course, only the "entering wedge." The white occupation technically began with the treaty of Saginaw in 1819, Governor Cass having waived the claim of the earlier treaty to the territory not under- stood by the Chippewas to have been included in the cession. But it was not until twelve years later that the first permanent white set- lers appeared in the county, the Indians mean- while enjoying the use of the land for hunting, fishing, and maple-sugar making, which was the only use they had ever wished to make of

PAST AND PRESENT OF

it. Even as late as 1837 there were but few settlers in the county and the Indians had not been strictly confined to the limits of their lawful domain, the Kechewondaugoning reser- vation. By the treaty of Detroit, concluded in that year, when they joined the other Saginaw- Chippewa bands in ceding the reservations, their last claim to the Shiawassee country was relinquished. So it was not until the year in which Michigan became a state that the white race came into complete possession of the county. During the first half of the twenty- one years which it took the one race entirely to supersede the other, the whites were repre- sented by only a handful of traders. While the business of these men was primarily to trade with the Indians, they frequently acted as able assistants to the government officials, as was mentioned in the account of Governor Cass's negotiations preliminary to the conclu- sion of the treaty of Saginaw. Their knowl- edge of the country, its topography, its re- sources, and their acquaintance with the In- dians rendered their advice of great value to the succeeding Indian commissioners.

The first trader known to have followed Bolieu into the Shiawassee valley, and cer- tainly the first to establish a regular post here was Whitmore Knaggs, who acted as chief interpreter for General Cass in the council at Saginaw in 1819. A list of the licensed trad- ers in Michigan in the year 1820 places Knaggs "on the river Shiawassee at the In- dian reservation." In that year Whitmore Knaggs came to the Kechewondaugoning and established his post on the west bank of the river opposite the salt springs for which Bo- lieu had named the place the "Grand Saline." In a picturesque spot convenient to the cross- ing discovered by the Frenchman four years

before was built the first rude cabin of the several which afterwards comprised the post. From that time the various names bestowed upon the place disappeared before the homely, . forceful name of Knaggs. Long after the post was abandoned this famous crossing was known as Knaggs' Place by every immigrant and traveler who had visited the southern half of the Lower Peninsula. When in 1838 the township of Burns voted fifty dollars to pay for a bridge across the river, the wooden affair constructed was called Knaggs' bridge. That bridge has had several successors, all built about eighty rods farther up the river. A modern one of iron now spans the river there. Its immediate predecessor of the same type having recently been crumpled up by a spring flood and deposited in the bed of the stream. All these several structures, as well as the set- tlement which grew up around them, have borne the name of the trader who made his home in the neighborhood for twenty years.

The trader also had his successors, though the post was still called by his name. The first of these was a man named Grant, who came in 1824. He continued in the trade for a time but became so unpopular with the In- dians that they finally drove him from the country. In 1828 the post was reopened by Richard Godfroy. When, in 1829, the place was visited by A. L. and B. O. Williams, they found John B. Cushway in charge as God- froy's agent. The post as it existed then is described as a rude log house and a stable. John Knaggs, a son of Whitmore, was God- froy's successor. With an assistant, Antoine Beaubien, a French trader and trapper, he continued the post until 1839. During their incumbence the post increased in size and im- portance. They lived in a more comfortable

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY

manner than the earlier traders, Knaggs hav- ing three commodious log houses, one used as a store, and Beaubien and his family oc- cupying three others. Beaubien's home was in a pretty cove farther up the river, near a beautiful spot where the home of the late Mr. T. H. Reeves now stands, under the sheltering branches of grand old forest trees.

As long as either Knaggs lived at this best known crossing of the Shiawassee it was the point to which all newcomers were directed, whether they came from the east by the way of Detroit or from Ohio through Toledo. It was a sort of gateway into the Shiawassee valley, and every new family who forded the river and stopped at the post for a meal or to spend a night were more or less indebted to the traders for directions and advice concern- ing their weary journey into the woods. Some of the oldest of the early settlers now living in the neighborhood remember the elder Knaggs as a fine looking man, tall and well proportioned, and say that he was also an in- telligent and interesting talker. He died at his son's home, near their old trading post, in 1840 and was survived by his son only about six years. In an exhaustive history of the re- markable and extensive Knaggs family pub- lished four or five years ago, it was stated that Whitmore Knaggs died at Detroit at an earlier date. This is obviously a mistake, as his death and funeral are well remembered by a number of persons still living at Bancroft and Newburg. In the papers from which we have previously quoted, Mr. L. E. Gould wrote as follows concerning the event :

"One day in the year 1840 a lad of six years standing near his father's house situated in the southeast corner of the town of Shiawas- see, not far from where that town touches cor-

ners with the towns of Antrim, Burns, and Vernon, saw what to him was a strange and weird sight. It was the passing of a funeral procession. It had come up over the original Grand river road from 'Knaggs' Place' on the Shiawassee river and was on its way to the burying ground near the then new village of Fremont. For at that early date in the history of the county this funeral procession comprised a large company of people. Not only the pioneer farmers had gathered from far and near, but in that moving throng were to be seen nearly all of the white people who for twenty years resided at or in the vicinity of Knaggs' Place.

"At no other place in central Michigan would it have been possible to have gathered such a curious and interesting mixture of ·races, for in that procession there were not only Americans, but English, French, and In- dians. They were all vieing with each other to see who could show the most honor and esteem to the memory of the man who had been a good friend to the man of the woods, to the man who gave to the region known as Shiawassee a place not only in the history of the state, but in that of the nation.

"The mortal remains which at that time and place were conducted to the grave with so much pomp and ceremony were those of Whit- more Knaggs. The lad who on that day in 1840 saw the funeral procession of Whitmore Knaggs has for many years been a successful farmer and business man, and is now known as Edson L. Lyman."

Mr. Lyman still resides on the farm de- scribed. Two other persons now living in the vicinity of Newberg, Mrs. Lucinda Shears and Mrs. Rhoda Snell, who are daughters of Sidney Seymour, one of the early settlers of

PAST AND PRESENT OF

that village, remember the funeral of Knaggs. They also attended the funeral of John Knaggs, who died in 1846. While his father was buried at Fremont, John Knaggs, for some reason now unknown, was buried at Newburg, in the first cemetery which was lo- cated on a slight elevation between the old church and the still older school house at that place. The cemetery was afterward removed and a number of store buildings erected on the ground. In making repairs in a cellar underneath one of the old buildings, in the early '80s, one of the old graves was discov- ered, containing the skeleton of a man. It had evidently been overlooked when the oth- ers were removed, but whether it was the grave of John Knaggs could not be ascer- tained.

Knaggs' post, consisting of a cluster of log cabins in which savages exchanged the skins of wild animals for a few of what we term the necessaries of life, may be considered the ex- treme of primitiveness in mercantile establish- ments. To be sure, the traders were not obliged to make a fort of the post and "do their trading from the top of battlement balls," as a writer has recently said the Hudson Bay Company's agents had to do in those days. They did not even have to surround their buildings with a stockade, for the Saginaw- Chippewas had been so thoroughly subdued that none of the Shiawassee bands ever gave the traders any serious trouble. Indeed, the earliest traders, particularly the Frenchmen, are said to have fraternized with the Indians in a degree and especially in the matter of marrying. That is, some of them married the Indians' sisters, though it does not appear that the Indians were permitted to marry their sisters. As civilization drew nearer and

the stock began to include a few luxuries, such as firewater and tobacco, which speedily be- came necessaries when the savages began to live more as their white brothers lived, the place may have had some resemblance to a "general store," but to the end of its existence it remained an isolated outpost of the business world. And yet such a place may have its romances and no doubt the post on the reser- vation had its share of them. One, at least, of the "hidden treasure" variety, has been re- membered and remains to-day, as it always has been, an unsolved mystery.

When, some years after the treaty of Sagi- naw, the Shiawassee country was opened for settlement, others besides immigrants in search of homes began to turn their attention to the rich, new timber lands which the gov- ernment was offering at the price of one dol- lar and a quarter an acre, or "ten shillings an acre," as it was invariably expressed by the settlers from New York and the New England states. Speculators began to penetrate the forests, quietly seeking choice sections of lands to secure and hold until the demand for home- steads should raise the price. These men, like all other travelers in this part of Michigan, were fairly sure to spend a night at the Grand Saline with Whitmore Knaggs. While lands that were located in this way would be paid for at the land office in Detroit when they were entered, the men who were making these long and rambling journeys frequently carried money in considerable amounts, and generally in coin, of course. The banking system not then having been extended into the interior of the territory, the method common among trav- elers for providing themselves with a supply of cash was to wear around the waist a double belt in which the coins or bills were placed.

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY

This custom, while it was certainly conveni- ent, must have been rather uncomfortable for an opulent traveler, and at times very unsafe.

During the time that this class of speculators was most active and in connection with a visit which a party of them made at the post, a story got afloat which credited Knaggs with having suddenly come into possession of a large amount of gold. Whether the elder Knaggs was a skillful or a lucky gambler and won the money in a game with his guests or whether he obtained it in some manner less fair than that does not appear in the story, but the report that he had secured it by some means and buried it for safe keeping gained credence and traveled so far that in time it brought adventurers from distant states to dig for the buried treasure of Shiawassee's Captain Kidd. The first person known to have searched for the gold was a man named Hadd, who, about twenty years after the story was first told, dug in several localities around Knaggs bridge, without success, About 1860 a number of strangers appeared at the bridge and, working mysteriously during the hours of the night, dug up the land along the river in many places. They left without disclosing their identity or the object of their search. The residents in the vicinity of the old trading post have never taken any particular interest in the legend of the buried gold, but at inter- vals in all the years since the death of the younger Knaggs, men unknown to anyone in the neighborhood have visited the place and all have apparently been there on the same errand. Most of them have besought the in- habitants to tell them about the exact location of a certain spring and a tree. Some have

asked to have pointed out a rock in the river known as "Indian Rock." A party of men once called at the home of Mr. E. O. Byam, and showed him a map of the river at Knaggs' bridge, upon which was marked the rock, the tree, and the spring. They refused, however, to allow Mr. Byam to point out these places of interest to them, preferring to find them themselves with the aid of the map.

'One act has been characteristic of all the mysterious strangers who have thus far ap- peared ; they have invariably carried on their search by night. Their lights have shone along the river on many a murky night, but no one knows whether any of them was ever rewarded for his trouble. Once when the tale had been in a fair way to die out and be forgotten, it was revived by the statement of an Indian girl, the daughter of Wab-ben-ness, a famous Indian who at one time lived on the Kechewondaugoning reservation. She as- serted that she had seen Whitmore Knaggs in the act of burying an iron pot in the river near the rock whose fame has traveled far and wide. "When Knaggs saw me watching him," . said the girl, "he told me that the Gil-thi-e-gan would get me if I told anyone. Near the place described, Mr. Lester Roberts, who for a number of years had a grist mill at the bridge, once found buried a jug of a strange and curious pattern, but whether or not this was the trader's innocent cache will probably never be known. Years hence the sons of those men who traced the rock and the spring and the tree by their maps may return and burn their questing lights up and down the Shiawassee, so fascinating to boys and men is a story of the hidden-treasure brand.

PAST AND PRESENT OF

THE SHIAWASSEE EXCHANGE

The second trading-station in the county to be occupied by regular licensed traders was also on the Shiawassee river only a few miles below the Knaggs post. It was established by Alfred L. and Benjamin O. Williams, as agents of Rufus W. Stevens and Elisha Beach of Pontiac. In 1829 the Williams brothers had made a prospecting tour of the country, visiting the Knaggs post and other places on the river. They returned in 1831 and in Au- gust of that year opened the post for busi- ness.

The location they chose was on the west bank of the river just north of the north line of the Kechwondaugoning reservation. It was within the present limits of Shiawassee township, though very near the boundary line which separates it from Vernon township. A. L. Williams had previously entered an eighty- acre tract of government land there. This was undoubtedly the earliest purchase of land in the country made with a view to settlement by the owner. Whitmore Knaggs, it is true, had located here in 1820, and other traders had lived at his post in the intervening years, but they were in no sense settlers, their purpose being to remain only so long as traffic with the Indians continued to prosper. But the case was different with the Williams brothers. They were probably the first white men who came with the full intention of becoming per- manent residents and they therefore may be accorded the distinction of having been the pioneer settlers of the Shiawassee valley.

With two assistants and a double ox team they made the journey through the wilderness from Pontiac, having to cut portions of the

road for their team as they proceeded. Their wagons were loaded with household utensils and building material which greatly facili- tated their first preparations for home making. They built a double log house, a story and a half high, to serve as both business house and dwelling, and began what soon developed into extensive operations in the fur trade. From all the river country furs came to their station and also from Clinton county and a large ad- joining territory on the south and east, as well as much of the northern country whose products had previously gone to the Campaus and other French traders on the Saginaw river.

In 1832 the firm became agents for the American Fur Company, which was the name under which John Jacob Astor carried on his far reaching operations in the middle western states. Trade at the post increased so rapidly that it soon became necessary to enlarge the facilities for handling the business. In 1835 a frame house was erected adjoining the double log house, which itself had been a notably substantial building, the new portion being occupied by Mr. and Mrs. A. L. Will- iams as a residence. This was a large two- story structure and was a triumph in archi- tecture, considering the difficulties under which it was built, much of the material being transported a long distance through a country almost without roads. The rooms were com- modious, those on the ground floor being de- signed for business offices and living rooms. The fireplaces were wide and deep, and the windows were unusually large, though com- posed of many small panes. There was even

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY

some attempt at decoration, the gables being adorned with ornamental, fan-shaped carv- ings, and the front, or western side, had a cor- nice of black walnut peculiarly carved by hand. The frame building was to that new country what the earliest in modern sky-scrapers have been to our large cities, and some years after- ward, when it was used as a bank, it became famous throughout central Michigan under the name of the Shiawassee Exchange. In later years it was a well known tavern and finally it became a private dwelling, which it

last year of their residence they carried on the business as independent traders, having given up the agency for the American Fur Company in 1836. For various reasons the Indians were by that time losing their im- portance as customers. White settlers began to arrive in rapidly increasing numbers. Among them were many persons who did not scruple to sell the red men whiskey, then eas- ily purchased at the distilleries for twenty-five cents per gallon, and this soon told power- fully on them. In 1834 Asiatic cholera spread

SHIAWASSEE EXCHANGE

remained to the end of its eventful existence. In 1895 it was torn down and replaced by a modern farm house. In connection with this first frame house in Shiawassee county was the first frame barn, also built in 1835. Henry Leach was the builder, and the lumber of which it was constructed was all drawn from Oakland county on wagons.

These buildings, which were much more pretentious than those that made up the aver- age frontier trading post, were occupied by the Williams brothers until 1837. During the

over all Michigan and attacked the Indians along the Shiawassee and other rivers, pro- ducing convulsions and death after a few hours. Three years later smallpox broke out among them and by the ravages of this pesti- lence they were so greatly reduced in numbers and so scattered and demoralized that their trade was no longer of any value. The Will- iams brothers, considering it the part of wis- dom to abandon their trading station, removed to Owosso. In that year, 1837, trading with the Indians practically came to an end, al-

PAST AND PRESENT OF

though the Knaggs post was not closed until two years later.

When the Williams post was vacated by the owners it was rented to and later purchased by Andrew Parsons and Lemuel Brown for a hotel. Levi Rowe was the first landlord in- stalled. The next two or three years were eventful ones in the history of the place. Pro- vision for the civil organization of Shiawassee county had been made by an act of the legisla- ture, approved March 13, 1837. The organ- ization was completed by the election of coun- ty officers in the following May, at which time Levi Rowe was elected sheriff. The organ- izing act had directed that the circuit court should be held in such place as the sheriff of the county should provide. The place selected was the home of the sheriff, the tavern, which was known by that time as the Shiawassee Ex- change, in consequence of a bank having been established there under that name. The first term of the court began on December 4, 1837. Hon. Alfred L. Williams and Hon. James Rutan presiding, they having been elected associate judges.

At this time the county consisted of four townships, Shiawassee, Owosso, Burns, and Vernon. The first recorded session of the board of supervisors, representing these town- ships, was held at the Exchange, commencing October 2, 1838. The board of county com- missioners, which for a time replaced the board of supervisors as the governing body of the county, held a meeting there in Septem- ber, 1839.

Soon after the building was first occupied as a public house a company from Ohio ar- rived, among whom were Messrs. Morehouse, Bell, Toll, and others, and established a bank- ing enterprise under the title of "The Ex-

change Bank of Shiawassee." The bankers' quarters were in the frame part of the build- ing, which from that time was known by the name of the bank itself. "Shiawassee Ex- change" was painted in several places on the building. On the east side, overlooking the river, it appeared in large letters extending the whole length of the house and these the suns and dews of sixty years never entirely effaced from the weather-beaten boards. The designation was also applied to some extent to the locality as well as the house.

The old house on the river bank, with its faded sign indicating past activities, was an object of interest to the succeeding generations of boys and girls who boated and skated be- neath its shadow and pondered on the wisdom the pioneers displayed in locating a business house in that secluded spot. The river has a narrow channel there and rather steep banks, and it flows swiftly and silently under over- hanging trees. The highway makes a pictur- esque turn close to the corner of the house and dips gently to the iron bridge, which is almost hidden by the shade of long sweeping branches. It is one of the most beautiful of the many charming scenes along the river. The pioneers chose well and no doubt hoped that other buildings would be the nucleus of a great city. But destiny in the guise of "im- provement companies" willed otherwise. In time the locomotives of the Grand Trunk Western with their "vestibuled limited" and mammoth freight trains roared by within a stone's throw. Like a thundering spirit of progress, they left the old place shrouded in smoke and vibrating in the recurring silence emphasized by their tumultuous passage, but it was a solitary habitation to the end. The

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY

great cities are elsewhere, and Bancroft, the nearest station, is a mile away.

By an act of the state legislature passed De- cember 30, 1837, three bank commissioners were appointed, who were to begin their of- ficial duties on the 10th of January, 1838, the owners of the Exchange Bank of Shiawassee having meanwhile based their business transac- tions upon specie certificates then in use by them to the amount of twenty-seven thousand dollars. In a descriptive account of the Ex- change building written by Lucius E. Gould, is found the following reference to these certifi- cates :

"Before us as we write is one of the five- dollar bills that was issued from the Shiawas- see Exchange Bank on the 4th of February, 1838. It is printed in the form of a promis- sory note payable on demand to S. M. Green or bearer, and is signed by A. M. Clark, cash- ier, and A. Morehouse as president. S. M. Green was the Sanford M. Green who was not only Owosso's first public-school teacher, but one of Michigan's greatest jurists. This bill of old 'wild-cat' money was never carried from the vicinity of where the Exchange building once stood until it was presented to us in Oc- tober last, by Mr. James Lyman, of Antrim.

"In the days when this bill was issued the banks under the law were obliged to keep a reserve fund of five thousand dollars in specie on hand. When the bank commissioner came around to Shiawassee he was invariably en- tertained by the citizens, with a supper and a ball, which were given in the Shiawassee Ex- change building, but not until the money was counted and certified to as the correct amount required by the law. It was then the com- missioner was escorted to supper and ball room where, if possible, he was detained until

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Past and present of Shiawassee County, Michigan, historically; with biographical sketches, Part 3

Author: Publication date: 1907 Publisher: Lansing, Mich. : Hist. Pub. Number of Pages: 580

Author:
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Lansing, Mich. : Hist. Pub.
Number of Pages: 580