The story
Welcome to Niles
Niles grew where Dowagiac Creek meets the St. Joseph River, a few miles from the French Fort St. Joseph and the Baptist Carey Mission. Traders opened a store here in 1828 and named their village in 1829 for Hezekiah Niles, the Baltimore newspaper editor. Today its museum, its fort site and its grand Michigan Central depot tell three centuries of river history.
The river here was a crossroads long before the town. The French built Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River south of the present city, and the state’s marker dates it to 1691; it passed to the British in 1761, was taken by Indians in Pontiac’s uprising of 1763, and in 1781 Spanish raiders from St. Louis flew their flag over it briefly, which is the root of Niles’s nickname, the City of Four Flags. The land east of the river was ceded by the Potawatomi at the Treaty of Chicago in 1821, but, Ellis notes, it was not surveyed and offered for sale until 1829. Settlers were first drawn by Isaac McCoy’s Carey Mission west of the river; Squire Thompson of Union County, Indiana, built a cabin on the riverbank in 1823.
In 1827 Ephraim and Elijah Lacey, Samuel B. Walling, Isaac Gray, William Justus and A. Thornberry came down the river from Richmond, Indiana, looking for water power, passed by Elkhart, and chose the mouth of Dowagiac Creek. In October 1828 Obed P. Lacey, Walling and Justus brought their families and a stock of goods; the books of Walling & Lacey, the first store in the St. Joseph valley according to Coolidge, opened that month, and in January 1829 they were headed “Pog-wa-tigue,” which Ellis renders “running water.” Obed Lacey acted as postmaster, and Isaac Gray received the first regular commission in 1830. On August 1, 1829, Justus, Walling and the Laceys laid out a plat that was recorded in Lenawee County as “the plat of the village of Niles”; Coolidge says Obed Lacey named it for the editor of the Niles Register, a favorite paper of his.
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The Laceys started a sawmill in January 1830 and a flour mill the same year, a raising that drew men from thirty miles around. Alamanson Huston opened the first tavern in a log house on Main Street in 1829, where the county’s first court was ordered to sit; Thomas K. Green’s house became the “Old Diggins” tavern, the headquarters of the officers during the Sauk (Black Hawk) war of 1832, when troops were quartered in the unfinished Pavilion hotel. A ferry licensed in 1831 carried teams across the river until the free Broadway bridge opened in December 1836. The First Presbyterian Church was organized in March 1834 and Trinity Episcopal Church that November, and Nathaniel Bacon’s American Hotel of 1835 was the first brick building in the village.
Niles was incorporated as a village by an act approved February 12, 1835, and received its city charter on February 12, 1859, with Elijah Lacey as first mayor. The Michigan Central was rerouted through the town in 1847, and the first passenger train from Detroit arrived on October 7, 1848, with about 130 invited guests; for a while steamboats met the trains at a tall warehouse by the bridge. Coolidge calls 1865 to 1872 a time of “unexampled prosperity,” when the population nearly doubled: in 1868 work began on the dam, the gas works and the iron Main Street bridge, and the large Reading House hotel went up. The Michigan Air Line reached Niles in February 1871.
The dam powered paper. J. W. French and J. B. Millard organized the Michigan Wood Pulp Company on the west bank in 1872, and as the French Paper Company it was, by 1906, the largest factory in the city; the Niles Board and Paper Company held the rest of the water power. After a quieter stretch, Coolidge credits the Business Men’s Association of 1901 with bringing new factories, among them the Garden City Fan Company from Chicago. The Michigan Central built its stone depot in 1892, famous for its landscaped grounds, and Henry A. Chapin’s mansion of 1882–84 became city hall in the 1930s and is now the home of the Niles History Center. The 2020 census counted 11,988 people.
