The story
Welcome to Watervliet
Watervliet began with a sawmill on a creek above the Paw Paw River in 1833 and lived by its mills for more than a century and a half, first lumber and flour, then fine paper. Its name is Dutch for flowing water. Today it is a small city in the fruit country of northeastern Berrien County, with Paw Paw Lake just to the north.
Watervliet stands on land the Potawatomi ceded to the United States at the Treaty of Chicago in 1821, which Ellis (1880) says took in all of Berrien County east and north of the St. Joseph River, apart from nine individual reservations. Ellis tells how Sumner and Wheeler put up the first sawmill on Mill Creek, near the Paw Paw River, in 1833, a small mill driven by a flutter wheel and run by two brothers named Van Dusen from Prairie Ronde, who lived in a slab shanty beside it and were, he says, the first white inhabitants of the spot. A millwright named Crocker rented the mill in 1835.
In 1836 Jesse Smith of the firm of Smith and Merrick, of French Creek in Jefferson County, New York, came to clear the large tracts the firm owned in Bainbridge, Watervliet and Hagar. He bought the Sumner and Wheeler mill, built another, and left Israel Kellogg in charge as the firm's land agent. The same year Smith and Merrick sent out Isaac Moffatt with thirty-two Frenchmen to clear their lands. Moffatt opened the first store, called the Mill Store, stocked from the cargo of his own vessel, and built a dam and gristmill. Smith and Merrick also laid out the village, at first only the narrow strip of Main Street between the creek and the river.
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In 1848 the firm sold the whole mill property to Isaac N. Swain of Jefferson County, New York, who also bought about a thousand acres nearby. A great flood in 1858 washed out the dam and nearly ruined the mills; Ellis says the owner of the gristmill, Jason Carr, was so overcome at the sight that he fell down and died. Swain took the property back and, with new partners, rebuilt the dam. Under Swain, Olney and Company the sawmill grew into one of the largest in the county, able to cut 30,000 feet of lumber a day. The post office was established in 1849, with Swain as postmaster. Before that, the settlers had their mail brought twice a week from Bainbridge.
The village was first called Waterford. Because another Michigan post office already bore that name, Ellis explains, it was changed to Watervliet, a Dutch term meaning flowing water, and the township took its name from the village. Dr. J. H. Wheeler, the first physician in the village, arrived in 1845 (Coolidge; Ellis gives 1846). Coolidge (1906) says the Methodist church in Watervliet was organized in 1846 and built a church in 1869. The township’s first Congregational church, organized in 1853, met in the Coloma area (Ellis, p. 348).
The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad reached Watervliet in 1869, and a grain elevator went up beside the depot. Fruit soon followed grain. In 1878, Ellis reports, one shipper sent out 2,000 barrels of apples, and about 15,000 baskets of peaches went from Watervliet to Chicago; in the busy season, he says, 3,000 baskets went out on a single train. Coolidge adds that the largest apple orchard in the county, Robert H. Sherwood's three hundred acres with more than 14,000 trees, lay in Watervliet Township.
Watervliet was incorporated as a village in 1891. The next year, Coolidge says, George E. Dudley and W. E. Syms of Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, set up a factory for fine writing and book paper, one of the largest of its kind in the West, although by 1906 it had been nearly idle for some years. The Watervliet Paper Company, organized in 1910, revived the mill and ran it for most of the century; it employed 470 people in 1960 and made its last paper in 1994. The mill was torn down in 2002, and the old dams on the Paw Paw River were removed in 2011. Watervliet became a city in the mid-1920s. The 2020 census counted 1,669 people.
