The story
Welcome to Three Oaks
Three Oaks began as a railroad siding where Henry Chamberlain sold cordwood, and took its name from three big oak trees near the track. A local merchant later made a fortune turning turkey quills into dress stays, and the village won a captured Spanish cannon that President McKinley came to dedicate. Its old factory and its office-and-bank building still stand.
Three Oaks lies in the country ceded by the St. Joseph Potawatomi at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis (1880) describes it as heavy forest of maple, beech, elm and a dozen other trees, with no openings or prairies. The early buyers were mostly speculators who expected New Buffalo to become a great port, and little land was sold to farmers until about 1850. Moses Chamberlain came to section 15 in the winter of 1843–44 and, Coolidge (1906) says, built the first frame house in the township. Coolidge says he was strongly antislavery and voted for the abolitionist James G. Birney in 1844.
His son Henry Chamberlain made the village. In January 1850 he took a contract to deliver 2,000 cords of wood to the Michigan Central at a side track on his land, which let him clear his land and be paid for it. Coolidge says the place was first known as Chamberlain's station. In 1854 Chamberlain and Joseph G. Ames opened a store there, and a post office was established under the name Three Oaks, which Ellis says came from three large oak trees standing near each other; the township took the name when it was set off from New Buffalo in 1856. Chamberlain made the first plat, about five acres south of the railroad, on December 30, 1857, and added to it several times in the 1860s. Ellis notes that he had already sat in the state legislature in 1849, and he remained a leading figure in the county for decades.
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Ellis says growth was slow until 1863, but by 1880 the village had about 500 people inside its limits and 200 more nearby, four churches, sawmills, handle factories, a stave mill nicknamed the Coffee Mill, and a printing office. The village was incorporated by an act approved March 20, 1867, and at the first election William Chamberlain was chosen president. The Congregational church, which began at New Buffalo and moved here, built its church in 1870; a German Evangelical congregation organized in 1866, and the Methodists built a brick church in 1878.
The village's great industry came from Edward K. Warren, who had clerked for Henry Chamberlain. He found that turkey quills, which a Chicago feather duster company threw away as too stiff, made a better dress stay than whalebone, and he began making 'featherbone' in Three Oaks in the 1880s. Coolidge says the Warren Featherbone Company had branch factories in Chicago and elsewhere and offices in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and that the home factory employed 250 to 350 people. In 1905 Warren built a handsome brick and limestone office for the company and his bank on Elm Street. From 1899 he paid the village $250 a year, the amount of the saloon license fee, on condition that no saloon be licensed, and Coolidge notes that Three Oaks had had none since.
When the battleship Maine was sunk in 1898, the people of Three Oaks raised $1,400 for a memorial to her crew, a remarkable sum for so small a place, and were rewarded with a bronze cannon captured by Admiral Dewey's fleet at Manila. President William McKinley dedicated the park on October 17, 1899, and the cannon was presented on June 28, 1900. Warren's foundation later gave land for Warren Dunes and Warren Woods state parks. The 2020 census counted 1,370 people in the village.
