The story
Welcome to Union City
Union City stands where the Coldwater River joins the St. Joseph, a site its founders thought would be the head of navigation and the end of a canal from Lake Erie. Laid out as Goodwinsville in 1835 and as Union City in 1837, it waited until the Air Line Railroad of 1870 to grow.
A trader, John Clawson, is said to have been the first white man at the mouth of the Coldwater, about 1830. About 1831 Isaiah W. Bennett, the founder of Jackson, and Jeremiah Marvin bought land at the forks, seeing water power in both rivers and a meeting place of Indian trails. The first permanent settler was Justus Goodwin, a Hamilton College graduate and lawyer, who bought the Marvin lots in March 1833 and came in May. He built the first shanty, and in 1834 dug a race from the Coldwater River and began a sawmill. About the first of December 1834 a post office named Goodwinsville was opened with Goodwin as postmaster.
Goodwin had sold 322 acres to E. W. Morgan of Ann Arbor, and Morgan’s plat of the village of Goodwinsville was recorded on August 27, 1835. In January 1836 Charles G. Hammond bought much of the site as agent for a New York company, and in the spring of 1837 the proprietors, the Clarks, Isaac M. Diamond and Lyman W. Gilbert, laid out the village of Union City on a ‘two-hundred-acre tract,’ the plat acknowledged on April 10, 1837. Israel W. Clark and Diamond came in 1838 with a large force of men, enlarged the race and built a sawmill and a gristmill. The company’s store at Broadway and High streets came to be called the ‘Subtreasury.’
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Union City set its hopes on a canal and on steamboats, and let both the Michigan Southern and the Michigan Central pass it by. About 1850 a company built a steamer here, 95 feet on the keel; on launching day she was poled down the river and back with about 150 people aboard, drawing very little water. She got her machinery at Mishawaka, ran as far up as Three Rivers, never came back to Union City, and at last capsized against a bridge, drowning her captain. The 1879 history says this ended navigation of the upper St. Joseph. The Union City Iron Company, incorporated in March 1847, smelted bog ore in a blast furnace for some years.
John D. Zimmerman, a blacksmith from Connecticut, came in 1838. The county histories call Union City a station on the Underground Railroad and Zimmerman its station master, who would rise at midnight to carry fugitives on to Marshall. In 1842 the son of William Smith, a blacksmith who had come north with free papers, was followed to the village by a slaveholder; the man went home empty-handed, and the son was sent on to Canada for a time.
The village was incorporated by the county board, which had found 545 people in the area; the first election was held on January 25, 1866, and the legislature gave it a new charter on March 23, 1869. Mixed trains ran on the Michigan Air Line in the fall of 1870, and the village grew from then on. It built its water works and bought the electric light plant in 1894–95. The 2020 census counted 1,714 people in Union City.
