This is the house that Andrew and Clarissa Hays built in Marshall, MI in the 1830s. At the time of the Black Hawk war they were still living in a log cabin. It was not at this site, though possibly it was as near as a block or so away. (This photo is from a July 2005 bike ride.) The house was built a little afterwards.
Andrew Hays was a physician. He came to Michigan with money, which he invested in land. He later told that when the militia company from Marshall had gone to the gathering place at Schoolcraft, he had learned that his services were not needed so continued on to the land office at White Pigeon to buy more land.
He obtained about 15 land patents altogether, over the years. Another was issued in Clarissa’s name. I’ve been curious, probably for no good reason, as to which land he bought when he went to White Pigeon during the war scare. It’s hard to say for sure, because while the records that are easily available online tell us when the land patents were issued, they don’t tell us when the buyer went to the land office and put down his money.
For reasons that I won’t go into now, my best guess is that the land he bought on that trip to White Pigeon included 80 acres immediately to the right of the gravel road shown here, on Climax Prairie in Kalamazoo County. I rode through here last October. This scene is not very prairielike, but there still is prairie just beyond the trees on either side of the road. The land to the right was originally purchased by Hays. That part can be verified. The question is whether it’s a parcel he bought during his militia duty in 1832. The answer will have to be a tentative one for now.
When Hays went to White Pigeon, he would have followed the Indian trail that went from present-day Schoolcraft to White Pigeon prairie, which has now been replaced by highway US-131. I’ve ridden it most of the distance between Schoolcraft and White Pigeon, but in places it’s not very good for riding. There’s too much truck traffic and the road is too narrow. But I see from Hinsdale’s Archaeological Atlas of Michigan (1831) (1931) that the trail actually was west of US-131. It followed a course just to the east of Kalamazoo Street between Constantine and White Pigeon, which means it closely paralleled the road in the photo above, but was a bit to the left of it. That’s the route that Hays almost certainly would have taken into White Pigeon. (You can see White Pigeon’s water tower in this photo, but to make it out you may have to double-click on it to see the larger version.)
Tonight I was reading in Peter S. Onuf’s “Statehood and Union : A History of the Northwest Ordinance” (1987) and learned that initially, it was thought best NOT to put the land offices out on the frontier, close to settlers. There were concerns that doing so wouldn’t attract the right kind of buyers.
The earliest settlers in St. Joseph County had to trek to Monroe County to buy land. But by 1831, there was sufficient pressure put on the government to have a land office located in White Pigeon, where it would be convenient to settlers. Andrew Hays was one who took advantage of it.
