The story
Welcome to Galien
Galien grew around a steam sawmill cut into the great Galien Woods, a forest of walnut, whitewood, beech and maple famous in early Berrien County. Its founder made broom handles by the million, and his village had one of the county’s Reorganized Latter Day Saints congregations. It is still a small village on the railroad and US-12.
The land west of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the St. Joseph Potawatomi at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Galien Township, on the Indiana line, takes its name from the Galien River, whose headwaters rise there; the river is usually said to be named for the seventeenth-century French missionary and mapmaker René de Bréhant de Galinée. Ellis (1880) says the township was covered with dense forest of beech and maple, with black walnut, whitewood and ash, and was known far and near as the Galien woods. Much of it was bought for its timber by mill owners in other townships before any farmer settled it.
The township was attached first to Bertrand and then to Weesaw, and was organized on its own in 1844; the first township meeting was held at James Edson's house, and 31 votes were cast. Ellis says that about 1851 Clapp and Cheney put up the first steam sawmill at what became the village. In 1853 George A. Blakeslee bought the mill and the east half of section 3, on which stood the mill and a single log cabin. He opened a store in 1854, became postmaster when the post office was established, and laid out the village plat in 1861.
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Blakeslee's mill burned in 1868 and was rebuilt in seventy days. By 1880 it could cut 25,000 feet of lumber a day and turned out 1,500,000 broom handles a year, shipped to St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Schenectady. Richard W. Montross, who had begun making handles in rented space in Blakeslee's mill, built his own Wolverine Handle Factory after the fire. It employed about forty men and boys and shipped handles across the United States and to Europe and Australia.
Blakeslee was also, Ellis notes, one of the foremost members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which followed Joseph Smith but rejected Brigham Young and polygamy. The congregation at Galien was founded with 70 members and met in Blakeslee Hall, the large room over his store that he kept free for religious services and public meetings. Coolidge (1906) says that for many years before his death in 1890 Blakeslee had entire charge of the church's finances. A German Lutheran church was organized in 1866 and built about 1869, the Disciples organized at Galien Centre in 1859, and a Methodist class formed in the village in 1871.
The village was incorporated by an act approved March 4, 1879, and Blakeslee was elected its first president at Hoskins' Hotel. Ellis counted about 500 people, 90 houses, stores, two handle factories, a stave factory and a gristmill, and a new brick schoolhouse built in 1877-78. Coolidge notes that Galien stood where the Michigan Central crossed the Vandalia line, and that Blakeslee started a bank with his son in 1880; the son, Edwin A. Blakeslee, served in the state senate from 1897 to 1901. The state census of 1904 counted 414 people. In 1971 two fires, in July and October, destroyed much of the northeast corner of the business district. The 2020 census counted 513 people.