The story
Welcome to New Buffalo
New Buffalo began with a shipwreck. A lake captain walking the beach in 1834 saw a harbor at the mouth of the Galien River and imagined a second Buffalo. For a year and a half it was the end of the Michigan Central Railroad, where passengers took steamers to Chicago, and later a busy railroad town. Today it is a lakeside city with a harbor, a beach and a railroad museum.
The Galien River reaches Lake Michigan at New Buffalo after passing through what the settlers called Pottawattamie Lake. Ellis (1880) says that in early days it was two miles long and covered with wild rice, and that wildfowl gathered there in countless numbers. The land west of the St. Joseph River was ceded by the St. Joseph Potawatomi at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis notes that the township is the most westerly in the Lower Peninsula.
The story of the town's founding was written down by Henry Chamberlain of Three Oaks for Ellis, and Coolidge (1906) reprinted it. In the fall of 1834 Captain Wessel Whittaker of Hamburg, New York, was in command of the schooner Post Boy when a gale drove her ashore near State Creek. He and his crew walked to Michigan City, and on the way to report the loss at St. Joseph he noticed the mouth of the Galien and judged it a fine harbor. He entered the land at the land office, laid it out on paper in Buffalo, named it New Buffalo, and sold a half interest to Jacob A. Barker and Nelson Willard for $15,000, later reduced to $13,000. In March 1835 Whittaker set out overland with Truman A. Clough, William Hammond and Henry Bishop, picking up the surveyor Alonzo Bennett at Bertrand on the way, and they reached the site the first week of April.
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They built a log cabin fifteen by twenty-four feet, cut a road to Talbot's mill about five miles away, and put up a store and warehouse at the foot of Whittaker Avenue. Mark Beaubien, later of Chicago, painted a tavern sign. Settlers came by vessel from Buffalo, among them Russell Goodrich, who built the hotel where the township was organized in March 1836. Ellis says the village was incorporated on March 28, 1836, with Alonzo Bennett as its first president. In 1837 the Virginia Land Company, whose members mostly lived at La Porte, Indiana, bought and platted 640 acres more. A lighthouse was finished in 1840 on the dunes near the river mouth; it was undermined by the shifting sand and fell about 1857.
The panic of 1837 ended the boom. In the winter of 1841–42, Ellis writes, only two families, Jacob Gerrish's and Russell Goodrich's, were living in the village, and the corporation lapsed about 1840. Revival came with the railroad. The Michigan Central chose New Buffalo for its western terminus and began work in the fall of 1847, building a bridge across the Galien and two long piers into the lake. When the line was finished to New Buffalo in 1849, Captain Eber B. Ward put on steamers to carry passengers from the trains across to Chicago. For about a year and a half the town was crowded with travel, until the railroad was completed around the end of the lake to Chicago and the steamers were withdrawn.
About 1850 a large German immigration began, and by 1906 Coolidge counted more than half the township's people as German by birth or descent. Coolidge lists a Methodist church organized in 1847, a German Evangelical church and a Catholic mission church in 1858, and a Baptist church in 1876. The village was incorporated again in 1869, with Sadler Butler as president, although Ellis records that this charter was repealed in 1879. On September 7, 1870, the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad was completed from Pentwater to New Buffalo, where it met the Michigan Central. Under the Pere Marquette, New Buffalo became a major engine terminal, with a roundhouse where trains took on fuel and water before the run to Chicago; the yard closed in 1984.
New Buffalo was again an incorporated village by 1904, when the state census counted 640 people there, and it became a city in 1965. The nation's first highway welcome center for travelers opened on US-12 at New Buffalo on May 4, 1935. The 2020 census counted 1,708 people in the city.
