The story
Welcome to Allen
Allen stands on the prairie where Moses Allen, who had seen it while surveying the Chicago road, built the first log cabin in Hillsdale County in 1827. His widow’s tavern served the road, the post office was long called Sylvanus, and the village was platted in 1868 and incorporated in 1950.
Moses Allen, the 1879 county history says, was living at Flat Rock on the Detroit River when he joined the party that surveyed the road from Detroit to Chicago in 1825, and on the way he noticed the prairie that now bears his name. A letter from his nephew James M. Burdick, printed in the same history, says he moved there in April 1827, to the place known by its Indian name ‘Macootah Siac,’ meaning ‘Sand Creek Prairie.’ A marker near East Chicago Street notes that he built the first log cabin in Hillsdale County there. Allen had served in the War of 1812, and he brought the county’s first flock of sheep.
The first mill on the prairie was a hole burned in the top of a large white-oak stump, with a spring pole over it, said to have been fitted up by an Indian trader named Campau before any white settlers came; settlers and Indians pounded corn in it, and crowds sometimes waited their turn until midnight. Allen died in October 1829, the first white man to die in the county, and his coffin was made from boards sawn by hand from a black-cherry log. His widow then built a ‘block’ tavern of whitewood logs on the Chicago road east of the present village. She married Hiram B. Hunt, a blacksmith and gunsmith who kept the tavern, served as the first postmaster and justice of the peace, and died of hydrophobia from the bite of a mad dog.
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The township of Allen, formed on March 17, 1835, at first took in the whole western quarter of the county; Litchfield and Reading were set off in 1837 and Camden in 1839. Near the prairie a thicket of plum and poplar, the ‘popple thicket,’ remained a favorite resort of the Indians long after the whites came. Isaac N. Russell kept a hotel in 1835, and the post office at Allen Prairie, called Sylvanus by 1836–38, was renamed Allen to avoid confusion with Sylvania, Ohio. A man named Randall built the ‘old Pink tavern’ in 1837, and the Allen House began as a building of tamarack poles about 1838–39.
Many lots were sold before the village was laid out, and it was not until 1868 that the owners recorded a plat on sections 9, 10, 15 and 16; additions followed in 1869 and 1871. The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway crossed the township with a station a mile north of the village, where hotels and stock and grain buyers gathered. A two-story brick union school was built in 1869 at a cost of $11,000, and Allen Lodge of Freemasons was organized on July 12, 1868. In the winter of 1878–79 the village had a hotel, five stores, two churches, a stave factory and the brick stores of Andrew and Charles Winchester, and the county history ranked it among the most important villages of the county after Hillsdale and Jonesville.
In 1900 the township had 1,328 people, and a local paper, the Allen Argus, had been started. On May 30, 1907, Charles W. Lake, a Union veteran, dedicated a monument to the township’s Civil War soldiers in the Allen Township Cemetery. Allen was incorporated as a village in 1950. The state designated the Captain Moses Allen site in 1993, and the 2020 census counted 201 people in the village.