The stagecoach at the Junction

Plainwell, Mich. The horses have stopped, but they have not settled. Four of them, dark, in two pairs, stand in the churned mud of an unpaved street with their harness slack and the lead pair’s heads turned toward the camera. Behind them the coach rides high and heavy on wheels taller at the back than the front, and its roof is crowded: ten or more men in caps and broad-brimmed hats sit shoulder to shoulder along the top, and one stands, the tallest thing in the picture. To the left is a plain two-storey clapboard building. To the right, at the very edge of the frame, a painted sign on a shop front has been cut off after five letters: “STOV.”

That is all the photograph says for itself. Everything else has been said about it by other people, and they do not agree. Shared online, it comes with a date and a story: that on 22 October 1869 “the last stage coach trip from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids took place,” and that this is that coach, stopped at the Plainwell House at “The Junction,” now the northwest corner of M-89 and North Main Street.

We went after the picture’s papers. We found the library that holds the negative, the centennial book that printed it in 1969, the county histories written while the stage drivers were still alive, a driver’s own obituary-style biography, the National Register study that traced the hotel’s ground to the present building, and the railroad records of 1868 to 1870. The hotel is real, and so is the stage line. The picture has been given four different dates by the people who handled it. None of them is the date in the caption, and nobody, in any source we could find, ever wrote down the day the last coach left.

The picture’s papers

DocumentedThe photograph belongs to the Grand Rapids Public Library. Its history website catalogues it as “Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo Stagecoach,” a title the record says was supplied by the cataloguer, credited to “Grand Rapids Public Library, History & Special Collections Dept., Archives,” collection 33-10-24, negative 1896, location “Plainwell, MI.” The cataloguer looked closely: “In the background is the Plainwell Halfway House on the Kalamazoo Plank Road. Four horses pull the stagecoach loaded with passengers, those on top of the coach in Civil War uniforms. Note ‘Kalamazoo’ printed above the door of the coach, and the larger wheels at the rear. The coach is the type known as the Concord coach.”

DocumentedA second record from the same library, shared to the state’s Michigan Memories portal, calls it “Kalamazoo stage coach, 1865,” and describes “The Kalazmazoo stage coach in Plainwell, Michigan. Several men are sitting and standing atop the stage coach. Four horses are pulling the stage coach.” Both records count four horses. The Michigan Memories rights line reads “© Grand Rapids Public Library. All Rights Reserved.”

DocumentedThe earliest printing we found is in Plainwell, 1869 to 1969: The First Hundred Years, the village’s centennial book, published in 1969 by its Centennial Book Committee, with art and layout by G. L. Rantz. The copy scanned by the Internet Archive, from the Allen County Public Library, has no copyright page. Among its pictures of horse races at the fairgrounds and the milkman’s dairy is this caption: “Patterson, Glynn & Lyon’s Stagecoach in front of THE PLAINWELL HOUSE, unloading passengers at the ‘Junction’ for the Allegan turn-off on the Plank Road in 1859. THE PLAINWELL HOUSE was located on the northwest corner of Main and Allegan Streets.”

ReadingPut that caption next to the one going around today and the family resemblance is plain: the Plainwell House, the “Junction” in quotation marks, the northwest corner of Main. The modern caption keeps the place and swaps the year and the story. We matched the 1969 picture to the library’s negative by the agreement of their descriptions. The scanned page itself would not open for us at a size that allowed a side-by-side comparison, so that match, though strong, is not yet confirmed by eye.

Four dates for one coach

DocumentedLine the captions up and the photograph has been dated four times. The centennial book says 1859. The library’s Michigan Memories record says 1865. The library’s own photo record gives no year but sees Civil War uniforms on the roof, which would put the scene in the war years of 1861 to 1865 or soon after. The caption online says 22 October 1869.

ReadingOnly the last claims a day, and it is the only one with no trail behind it. We searched for it in the county histories of Allegan and Barry (1880), Kalamazoo (1880 and 1906) and Grand Rapids (1891 and 1926), in the centennial book, in the National Register study of Plainwell, in the Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids libraries’ pages on the plank road and the railroads, and in the railroad timelines for 1868 and 1869. None mentions 22 October 1869. None names a last coach on any day. The Michigan newspaper archive that might hold an announcement does not allow automated searching, and we left it alone.

ReadingNeither the centennial book nor the library says how it arrived at its year, and the two are six years apart. The cataloguer’s “Civil War uniforms” is a reading of the clothes, not a date on the print.

DocumentedSome of what is said about the photograph online falls away on a close look. There are four horses in two pairs, as both of the library’s records say, not six. The rear wheels are larger than the front, as the cataloguer noted.

ReadingThe word “Kalamazoo” the cataloguer read above the door is not legible in the 800-pixel halftone copy that circulates; it needs the library’s print to read. The sign at the right, “STOV,” looks like the start of “stoves,” though no business of that name at the Junction is documented in the sources we read. The plain clapboard building fits a tavern of the 1850s or 1860s, but no other photograph of the Plainwell House turned up for comparison, so the building’s identity rests on the 1969 caption and the library’s description. The library calls it the “Plainwell Halfway House”; the nineteenth-century sources call it only the Plainwell House.

A tavern where two roads met

DocumentedPlainwell began as a mark on a road company’s plan. “In 1852 began the building of a plank-road from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids,” says the History of Allegan and Barry Counties (1880), “and a branch extending from this point to Allegan.” A man named Wellever saw what a fork in a toll road could be worth. He “looked upon it as an exceedingly advantageous locality for the establishment of a relay-house, tavern, etc. Consequently, he purchased one acre of land, and during the fall of 1853 began the construction of the old Plainwell House.” The book’s footnote calls him “Supposed to be Henry Wellever”; a list on its page 299 gives “Wellever, Abram,” and the 1990 National Register study calls him Abraham.

DocumentedHe did not keep it. Orson D. Dunham bought Wellever’s tract “In November 1853,” says the centennial book, “and in July 1854, the Plainwell House was formally opened to the public as a place of entertainment for wearied, hungry men.” The National Register study puts Dunham’s purchase of “the partially completed hotel and the forty acres surrounding it” in 1854. Dunham was the hamlet’s first everything: “Orson D. Dunham was postmaster and proprietor of the Plainwell House,” the 1880 history says, and the study adds that he took over the post office “in the Plainwell House at the junction” in 1854.

DocumentedWellever crossed the road. He bought the opposite corner, put up a small frame building, “and within it exposed for sale a meagre stock of groceries,” the 1880 history says, before selling out to Alfred S. and Albert Pierson and moving to Flint.

DocumentedThe place had a nickname before it had a name. The National Register study says the crossroads was known as “The Junction,” and that it “was an important junction for the Patterson, Glynn and Lyons stage coach lines,” where horses were changed and passengers could eat before going on. The name on the map came from the hotel, or so the town has always said. “The name ‘Plainfield’ was originally chosen but was changed to ‘Plainwell,’” the study records, because “another town near Grand Rapids had the same name,” and “Allegedly, the village was named after the Plainwell House Hotel which had been a landmark at the junction since 1853.” The centennial book has no such hedge: the Plainwell House was “the first business actually built in the village,” “after which the village was named.”

“Mr. Dunham relates that very frequently he had the passengers of seven four-horse stage-coaches stopping at his house for dinner.”

DocumentedSeven coaches, four horses each, means twenty-eight horses at one country tavern at dinnertime. The centennial book retold the scene in 1969: “As many as seven four-horse stagecoaches have been fitted up in front of the PLAINWELL HOUSE in a single day, while the weary passengers and crew enjoyed dinner inside.”

Forty-eight miles of plank

DocumentedThe road that made all this was a wooden one. Michigan’s plank-road law of 1848 let private companies lay roads of sawn timber and charge tolls; the Kalamazoo Public Library credits Governor Epaphroditus Ransom, a principal investor in this road, with helping to pass it. “Planks from two to four inches in thickness were laid upon timbers placed horizontally with a graded roadway,” the library explains. Albert Baxter’s History of the City of Grand Rapids (1891) names the company’s directors as “Epaphroditus Ransom and Israel Kellogg of Kalamazoo, and Charles Shepard and William H. Withey of Grand Rapids,” and its principal planking contractor as Titus Doan, with “an energetic and able assistant” in Benjamin Livingston.

DocumentedThe finishing date depends on whom you ask. The 1880 Allegan history: “The plank-road was completed in 1854, and immediately became a thronged thoroughfare for the hauling of freight, lumber, and farm produce; besides, it was a favorite route for stage travel.” Baxter: “completed and tolls taken thereon throughout its length in the summer of 1855.” The Grand Rapids Public Library’s finding aid for its plank-road collection agrees with Baxter that “coaches began using it in 1855.” Baxter gives the length as “about forty-eight miles.”

DocumentedThe finding aid gives the fare: “It was $2.50 for passengers to make the 48 mile coach trip,” starting at the Eagle Tavern on Market Avenue in Grand Rapids. A WMUK report of 2019 says the road “cut travel time between the villages in half - from two days, to just one.” The Wikipedia article on a Kent County tavern claims a six-hour trip; we could not trace that figure to a primary source, and it sits awkwardly beside WMUK’s full day.

DocumentedBefore the planks, the journey was a different animal. A Middleville woman, Mrs. A. D. Thomas, recalled that in the early 1840s “The stage ran from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids once a week,” and that it was “a large wagon drawn by two horses,” later improved with “an oil cloth cover and four horses,” and remembered that “Passengers used to carry rails to pry the stage out of the mud.” Samuel Durant’s History of Kalamazoo County (1880) traces stage service between Kalamazoo and the Grand River country to 1833: “A line of stage-coaches was put in operation in 1833 between Kalamazoo and the Grand River country by one Sargent.”

DocumentedOn the plank road, traffic boomed. “The completion of the Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo plank road, in 1855, gave a wonderful impetus to stage traffic,” Baxter wrote, “and the passage of from six to eight coaches a day over that road was not an unusual occurrence.” Of all the stage routes out of Grand Rapids, “The liveliest and most profitable of the routes was that to Kalamazoo.”

DocumentedSouth of Plainwell the road ran through a toll gate. The Daughters of the American Revolution marked its site with a tablet at Douglas Avenue and Baseline Road in Cooper Township. A family file read for WMUK by Paul Sugas describes the gate as “a covered barn that went across the road, and it had a draw,” and records that “During the seasons of 1855 and 1856, A.P. Ware and his wife Anna kept the toll gate and sold tobacco, cigars and beer to wayfarers.” The Wares remembered “some pretty contentious confrontations between people hauling things” over who should give way on the narrow planking.

DocumentedThe marker’s closing date depends on whose transcription you read. The Kalamazoo Public Library gives its text as “the old toll gate built in 1852 and discontinued in 1868”; the Historical Marker Database transcribes the last year as 1858. WMUK’s report says the gate “closed just 16 years later,” which agrees with 1868. None of the sources we read gives the toll rates.

DocumentedPlanks rot, splinter and warp, and the company knew a railroad was coming. Lucien H. Stoddard of Cooper Township, remembering in 1930 as the Kalamazoo library quotes him, said that “the planks were wearing out under the heavy traffic” and that the company was “very loath to put expense on the road for repairs.” Of Governor Ransom, the Allegan County historian Mark Lovett told WMUK: “He lost his shirt.”

Patterson’s drivers

DocumentedThe 1880 Allegan history names the line that made the Junction a stage town: “After the plank-road and the success attending Patterson, Glenn & Lyon’s line of stage-coaches, the next impetus given the village was the organization of the Plainwell Water-Power Company,” in the spring of 1856. The centennial book and the National Register study spell the middle name “Glynn.” None of the three gives a first name for any partner.

DocumentedOne of the men who drove for Patterson left a trace. David Fisher and Frank Little’s Compendium of History and Biography of Kalamazoo County (1906) carries the life of John W. James, born in Monroe County, New York, on 12 July 1822, who came to Alamo Township with his family in 1839, cut cordwood, and worked on D. S. Walbridge’s boats carrying flour down the Kalamazoo River. Then, the book says, he worked for “W. G. Patterson, the owner of extensive stage lines,” and drove for him for thirteen years, chiefly between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, saving his wages to buy land. A few weeks before his death on 14 August 1905, “a meeting of the old stage drivers was held at the home of Mr. James.” Three of his old companions came.

ReadingW. G. Patterson, owner of stage lines, driving the Kalamazoo–Grand Rapids road for thirteen years: he is very likely the Patterson of Patterson, Glenn & Lyon. Thirteen years is also, almost exactly, Baxter’s span for the plank road’s working life, 1855 to the railroads. The 1906 sketch does not name the firm, so the identification rests on the match of name, route and trade.

DocumentedBaxter adds names from the Grand Rapids end. “In 1855, Harvey P. Yale succeeded William H. Withey in the management of the Kalamazoo stage, and Hawley Lyon and George C. Morton also had an interest in it for a time.” Withey was also a director of the plank-road company.

ReadingA Lyon with a stake in the Kalamazoo stage at Grand Rapids and a Lyon in the firm that ran coaches through Plainwell may be the same man. No source we read joins them, and we leave the two as a strong possibility, not a finding. Of Glenn, or Glynn, we found nothing.

DocumentedDurant’s 1880 history describes the coach these men drove, as Kalamazoo County remembered it. It was “familiarly known as the ‘Concord coach,’” because “the original pattern was built in Concord, N. H.” “The driver occupied a high seat in front,” with “a lamp firmly fixed, to light his way by night”; “an iron railing ran around the top of the coach”; and “inside of the coach were three seats, which would accommodate nine passengers.” Coming into town, the driver “whips out the tin horn from its sheath at his side.” “The common style of coach cost probably from two hundred to three hundred dollars.” When the roads were very bad, a lighter “mud-wagon,” on thorough-braces and drawn by two span of horses, took its place.

“Common want made them companions, and common hardships made them friends.”

DocumentedThe Concord’s makers were the Abbot and Downing shops of Concord, New Hampshire. Lewis Downing founded the business in 1813 and partnered with the coachbuilder J. Stephen Abbot from 1828 to 1847; from 1847 to 1865 the two ran separate shops, Abbot keeping the Abbot-Downing name and Downing working with his sons. A Smithsonian record for an 1848 coach credits it to “J.S. and A.E. Abbott and Lewis Downing and Sons” and calls the style one “operated by the hundreds” in the East and West.

ReadingThe photograph matches Durant’s description well: the railing around the roof that gives the men something to hold, the high driver’s seat, the rear wheels larger than the front. Who built this particular coach is not recorded, and “Concord” here is the type, not a documented maker’s plate.

The iron horse, twice

DocumentedThe first railroad came north from Kalamazoo. The 1880 Allegan history says articles for a Kalamazoo and Allegan Railroad were filed in the spring of 1868, and that in the summer of 1868 it became the Kalamazoo, Allegan and Grand Rapids. Plainwell’s centennial book: “The first railroad train came into Plainwell in 1868 over the road known as Lake Shore & Michigan Southern,” the name of the company that later ran it. The line went on through Otsego and Allegan; the 1880 history says “the first train of cars ran into Allegan on Thanksgiving-day, Nov. 23, 1868,” and Michigan’s railroad timeline gives the same date.

ReadingOne snag: Thanksgiving in 1868 fell on Thursday, 26 November, and 23 November was a Monday. The printed date or the printed holiday is wrong.

DocumentedFrom Allegan the track turned north through Hopkins and Dorr, and Grand Rapids raced to meet it. A Grand Rapids Historical Commission radio history, “Railroad Race” (2013), tells how citizens promised a bonus if a train ran into the city “on or before March 1, 1869”; how on 28 February more than 200 workmen were still finishing the bridge over the Grand River southwest of the city, its draw swung for the first time at about five in the afternoon; and how “on the last day of grace, the funny little locomotive arrived.” The 1880 history confirms that “the first train of cars reached Grand Rapids on the 1st of March, 1869.” On 1 October 1869 the line was leased to the Michigan Southern.

“No more shall we be confined to the old stage line.”

DocumentedThe radio history called the new line “the death knell of the Kalamazoo stage line.” But it went the long way round, west through Allegan. The direct route the coaches had used got its own railroad a year and a half later: Plainwell sat on a stagecoach route from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids, as a short encyclopedia history of the town puts it, and “later the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad was constructed along the same route.” The Grand Rapids and Indiana’s track from the south was completed into Grand Rapids on 13 September 1870; William Etten’s Grand Rapids history (1926) gives 10 October 1870 as the day regular trains began running south; and the Kalamazoo Public Library says that “by October, 1870, GR&I trains were running to Grand Rapids.” Plainwell was a junction again: “The arrival of two intersecting railroad lines in 1868 and 1870 reinforced the city’s status as a junction,” says the National Register study. In the centennial book’s words, “These two railroads formed a junction in Plainwell.”

The last coach, by the record

ReadingThe sources give two ends for the Kalamazoo–Grand Rapids stage, neither of them 22 October 1869. Grand Rapids wrote the obituary on 1 March 1869, when the Allegan line came in. The Grand Rapids Public Library’s plank-road finding aid puts the end later: “In 1870, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Rail Road completed their line, which also functioned to end the heyday of the plank road.”

ReadingBaxter, writing of the railroads that reached Grand Rapids in 1858, warned that “Staging did not die out at once when the railroads came.” Between Plainwell and Grand Rapids the plank-road villages had no train until October 1870, and coaches serving them could have run until then. The caption’s October date sits exactly a year before the direct line opened. That coincidence is worth noting and nothing more; until a newspaper of the day names a last coach, the date in the caption is unsourced and the photograph cannot be tied to it.

DocumentedNor does the picture itself speak of an ending. The library’s cataloguer read the men on the roof as soldiers; the centennial book read the scene as passengers unloading for the Allegan turn-off. Neither saw a farewell.

Landlords, and the end of the house

DocumentedThe Plainwell House changed hands often. In the fall of 1855, the 1880 history says, “Mr. Dunham sold his hotel property to Messrs. Mills & Merritt,” and the centennial book says the name changed with the sale. The National Register study tells it differently: Dunham “sold the hotel to Mr. and Mrs. George Mills the following year.” The name Plainwell House came back or never left: when the new village held its first election on “Monday, March 29, 1869,” the voters “assembled at the Plainwell House,” 215 of them, and made Joseph W. Hicks president.

DocumentedIn June 1869, the village’s list of taxpayers in the centennial book shows a proprietor of the Plainwell House whose name the scan renders as “Atehinson, J.H.,” probably Atchinson. The 1873 business directory in the same book lists “A. B. Sabins, Proprietor of Plainwell House. Good Livery attached,” alongside the National Hotel and the Russell House.

DocumentedThe house did not outlast the century. The National Register study says it “survived until about 1890” and, elsewhere, that it “was demolished in 1891.” Its successor went up the same year: “The Union Block was built in 1891 and replaced the former Plainwell House at 111-119 North Main,” a two-storey brick Italianate block with segmental-arch-head windows and decorative brick caps, cornice and frieze. Its corner unit was given a terra-cotta front in about 1905 for the Citizens’ Savings Bank and, in recent decades, what the study calls an “enormous mansard roof treatment.” The Soule Fountain that once stood in the middle of the intersection of Allegan, Main and Bridge streets was rebuilt in Hicks Park in 1970.

ReadingSo the caption’s “northwest corner” holds. Allegan Street enters from the west, Main runs north and south, and the angle north of Allegan and west of Main is the corner the study describes as “the angle between North Main and Allegan Streets.” The “M-89” of the caption is the state route that passes through the city today.

A timeline

• 1833 A stage line runs between Kalamazoo and the Grand River country (Durant, 1880).
• 15 years later
• 1848 Michigan’s plank-road law.
• 1852 Work begins on the Kalamazoo–Grand Rapids plank road and its Allegan branch.
• 1853 Fall: Wellever begins the Plainwell House. November: Orson D. Dunham buys the tract (centennial book; the National Register study says 1854).
• 1854 July: the Plainwell House formally opens. The 1880 history dates the road’s completion to this year.
• 1855 Summer: tolls taken along the whole road (Baxter). A. P. and Anna Ware keep the toll gate, 1855–56. Fall: Dunham sells the hotel.
• 1859 The centennial book’s date for the photograph.
• 1865 The date on the library’s Michigan Memories record.
• 1868 First train into Plainwell. 23 November: first train into Allegan. The toll gate near Plainwell closes (marker as transcribed by the Kalamazoo library).
• 1869 1 March: first train into Grand Rapids by way of Allegan. 29 March: first village election at the Plainwell House. June: J. H. Atchinson (as scanned, “Atehinson”) its proprietor. 1 October: the line leased to the Michigan Southern. 22 October: the caption’s “last stage,” unsourced.
• 1870 13 September: Grand Rapids and Indiana track completed into Grand Rapids from the south. October: its trains running through Plainwell.
• 1873 A. B. Sabins keeps the Plainwell House.
• 18 years later
• 1891 The Union Block replaces the Plainwell House.
• 1905 14 August: death of John W. James, Patterson’s driver, weeks after a reunion of old stage drivers at his home.
• 64 years later
• 1969 The centennial book prints the stagecoach photograph as 1859.

If you go

DocumentedThe Plainwell House stood at the heart of downtown Plainwell, where North Main Street meets Allegan and Bridge streets; the Union Block at 111–119 North Main is on its ground and can be seen from the public sidewalk. The Soule Fountain is in Hicks Park. The Daughters of the American Revolution toll-gate marker is at Douglas Avenue and Baseline Road in Cooper Township, south of town, on the right as you travel south; it stands in the front yard of a private house, so view it from the road.