The story
Welcome to Bronson
Bronson grew on the prairie where Jabe Bronson, the first settler in Branch County, built a log tavern in 1828. Laid out as York by the Waterman brothers, it took Bronson’s name by an act of 1837, was incorporated in 1866 and became a city in 1934.
In the spring of 1828 Jabe Bronson, a ship carpenter who had built vessels on Lake Erie and had raised a crop at White Pigeon the year before, settled on what was long called Bronson’s Prairie, a little south of the present village, and built a log house that he kept as a tavern. The 1879 county history notes that he always signed himself ‘Jabe,’ not Jabez. Seth Dunham, another ship carpenter, settled at the west end of the later village about the same time, and either he or a squatter before him set out the first orchard in the county. A post office was opened at the village about 1829–30 with Bronson as postmaster.
David and Alonzo Waterman came in 1833 and opened the first store on the prairie. Expecting a town to grow there, they platted a village they called York, David’s part south of the Chicago road and Alonzo’s north of it; deeds in the eastern part of Bronson still described lots as in the ‘old village of York’ in 1879. An act of the legislature in 1837 renamed the township of Prairie River and the village of York, and both became Bronson. The 1906 county history points out that Kalamazoo had been called Bronson after its founder, Titus Bronson, until 1836.
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The Potawatomi camped in large bands along the north edge of the prairie and came to Bronson’s tavern. E. L. Rose came in 1836, moved into the log hotel Bronson had left, and in 1838 built the frame hotel on the corner that still bore his name in 1879, a stage house where the coaches changed horses. When Jabez Clark’s family arrived on Christmas evening 1835, it is said there were only eight houses in the village. James Ruggles kept tavern in the frame house he built in 1837 for sixteen years.
On October 10, 1866, the county board of supervisors incorporated the village of Bronson, a tract exactly one mile square in sections 11 to 14, with 603 people; at the first election, on November 26, 1866, Warren Byrns was chosen president. The 1906 history lists the burning of the Powers & Gillam store on January 9, 1867, the Methodist church of 1871, the Ladies’ Library Association of 1880 and its change to the Bronson Public Library in 1888, and electric light in 1886.
A Portland cement plant was built a mile northeast of the village in 1897, and the population jumped from 864 in 1894 to 1,176 in 1900. The same history says a large number of Poles had settled in Bronson Township, though few in the village. Bronson was chartered as a city in 1934, according to the sesquicentennial marker of 2016. The 2020 census counted 2,307 people in Bronson.
