The story
Welcome to Bridgman
Bridgman grew up beside a depot on the lakeshore railroad, half a mile from a vanished lumber town called Charlotteville. For decades it shipped strawberry plants by the carload to every part of the country. Today it is a small city between the dunes, with a public beach at Weko and Warren Dunes State Park just down the shore.
The country west of the St. Joseph River was Potawatomi land until the chiefs of the St. Joseph Potawatomi ceded it to the United States at the Carey Mission treaty of September 20, 1828; Ellis (1880) names Topinabee and Pokagon among the sixty-nine chiefs and headmen who signed. He describes Lake Township as it was then: high dunes along the shore, sandy plains behind them and, running through the middle of the township, a great swamp. Coolidge (1906) calls it the Big Meadow and says the woods between the meadow and the lake were a favorite range for deer, and that one hunter, David Smith, killed more than sixty of them there in a single winter.
The township was part of Oronoko until 1846, and its first settlers took up the drier land on the east side, next to Oronoko. The ground where Bridgman stands, west of the Big Meadow, was settled late and settled by lumbermen. In the fall of 1856 George Bridgman, a newcomer from Massachusetts, formed the Charlotteville Lumber Company with Warren Howe and Charles F. Howe. Ellis describes a steam sawmill costing $20,000, a pier five hundred feet long on the lake, a railroad more than a mile long from the mill to the pier, and about seven miles of track running into the forest, with an engine and thirty-three cars. Schooners carried the lumber to Chicago. The mill town was called Charlotteville, after Charlotte Howe, the wife of one of the partners.
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Fire was the lumber town's undoing. The first mill burned in 1863, and Coolidge counts four more mills destroyed by fire between 1870 and 1878; by then the best timber was gone. George Bridgman stayed. He worked to bring the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad along the shore, and when it was built through the township in 1869-70 he platted a village half a mile east of Charlotteville, around the new station. Ellis says the survey was made by E. P. Morley in 1870 and that both village and station took the name Bridgman. The new village soon absorbed whatever business Charlotteville had kept, and by 1880 it had about 200 people, a good schoolhouse, stores, a stave and heading factory east of the depot, and the Thompson House hotel near the station.
The post office was older than the village. Ellis says it was opened in 1861 under the name Laketon, with Elijah Cowles as postmaster, and that George Bridgman held the office from 1863 to 1870; the name was changed to Bridgman about ten years after the office opened. Lake Lodge No. 143 of the Odd Fellows was organized in 1870, and a Methodist class at Bridgman became an organized body in 1865, though in 1880 it still met in the schoolhouse and the Methodists of the Bridgman circuit had built only a parsonage. George W. Bridgman, the founder's son, kept a law office in the village from 1872 and later practiced at Benton Harbor.
After 1890, Coolidge writes, settlers began pouring into Lake Township, many of them German, and in ten years the population doubled. The sandy land proved ideal for strawberries. Coolidge calls Bridgman the center of the strawberry business and names the nurseries of A. L. Baldwin, Charles Whitten and F. L. Ackerman, which shipped plants all over the country, often a carload a day from the Bridgman station. George Bridgman died in 1895.
In August 1922 the town drew national attention when the underground Communist Party of America held a secret convention at the Wolfskeel resort near Bridgman. Agents of the federal Bureau of Investigation, working with local officers, raided it on August 22, arresting about two dozen party officials; one of the leaders tried in 1923, C. E. Ruthenberg, was convicted, while the jury deadlocked over William Z. Foster. Coolidge noted in 1906 that Bridgman was not incorporated, and its citizens voted to become a city on December 19, 1949. The 2020 census counted 2,096 people in the city.
