The story
Welcome to Buchanan
Buchanan grew in the little valley of McCoy’s Creek, which drops quickly to the St. Joseph River and once turned more than a dozen mills. Its brick Front Street went up after a fire in 1862, and in the twentieth century Clark Equipment made it a factory town known far beyond Michigan. The last of the old water mills still grinds for visitors on summer Saturdays.
Before the settlers came, Ellis (1880) writes, the banks of the St. Joseph through Buchanan were among the favorite homes of the Potawatomi, with villages at Moccasin Bluff north of the present city and at Mis-a-qua-kee in what became its east side. Most of the township was ceded in 1828, but the village site lay in a reservation ceded only in 1833. McCoy’s Creek took its name from the Rev. Isaac McCoy of the Carey Mission, who, Ellis says, preached to the Indians on a bluff near here, where they built him a wigwam.
Charles Cowles, a Vermonter who had come to Niles in 1832, located the first claim on the village site in June 1833, built a cabin and put up a shingle mill on the creek. In 1834 John Hatfield of Wayne County, Indiana, took the next claim and with a Mr. Atkins built a sawmill, and Russell McCoy cleared ground at the mouth of the creek. The township was set off by an act approved March 11, 1837, and held its first meeting on April 3, 1837, at the house of Dr. Charles C. Wallin near the mouth of the creek; Ellis says simply that “the town derived its name from James Buchanan,” the Pennsylvania senator who later became president.
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John Hamilton, a millwright, was running a flour mill on the creek when he platted the village on July 21, 1842; Andrew C. Day lived nearby and Stanley & Staples kept a store. Additions followed from 1844 on. The Michigan Central passed along the south edge of the village, and mills, wagon shops and furniture factories crowded the creek. Buchanan was incorporated as a village in 1858, with James M. Matthews as first president; Ellis counted 860 people then and about 2,300 in 1878, with three water-powered flour mills, wagon works turning out 1,500 wagons a year, bedstead and furniture factories, and the Zinc Collar Pad Company of 1870, which Coolidge (1906) calls the first of its kind in the country.
A fire in 1862 leveled much of the business district, and merchants rebuilt in brick; the three-story Union Block, with a public hall on its top floor, went up in 1863. A flour mill built in 1857–58 on the creek later became Pears Mill. In 1891–92 a timber dam was built across the St. Joseph at Buchanan, and after 1900 Charles A. Chapin rebuilt its power house to send electricity to Buchanan, South Bend and St. Joseph. By 1906 the largest factory in town was the Buchanan Cabinet Company, and the Lee & Porter axle works and the George Rich Manufacturing Company, makers of machine-shop chucks and drills, had come.
The Rich company, persuaded to move from Chicago in 1904, was reorganized around the metallurgist Eugene B. Clark and renamed Clark Equipment in 1916. It made axles and then forklift trucks and loaders, built housing for its workers during the First World War, and for decades was Buchanan’s great employer before moving its manufacturing south in the 1980s. Buchanan became a city in 1929. Its downtown was listed on the National Register in 2009, and the Clark administrative campus in 2023. The 2020 census counted 4,300 people.
