The story
Welcome to Jonesville
Jonesville grew where the Chicago road crossed the St. Joseph River, around the tavern Benaiah Jones opened after he came in 1828. It is the oldest plat in Hillsdale County, held the county seat from 1831 to 1843, and was incorporated as a village in 1855 and as a city in 2014.
Benaiah Jones, Jr., came with his family and his brother Edmund in June 1828, and until they had a house of their own they lived in Moses Allen’s empty corn barn on Allen’s Prairie, where a son, Cordas M. Jones, was born that August, the first white child of the county. The brothers took title on June 8, 1829, to the northwest quarter of section 4, where the village stands. Jones built a log house on the west side of the river and kept the first tavern in it, and in 1831 built the log ‘block’ part of the Fayette House at Chicago and Water streets, adding the frame part in 1832. A post office was opened early in 1829 with Jones as postmaster, and his little iron hand mill ground the neighbors’ grain until a gristmill was built.
Thaddeus Wight brought his wife and seven children over the trail from Tecumseh in the spring of 1830 and squatted in a trappers’ cabin; his daughter remembered that the chief Baw Beese kept the other Indians back from the door until her frightened mother would let them in, and that a large band of Sauks and Foxes passing to Canada lodged Black Hawk and his sons in their house. In 1833 one of Baw Beese’s sons sat among the pupils of B. L. Baxter’s school in a log house on Maumee Street.
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Jones had the village surveyed in August 1830, fifty-eight lots running from East Street west to the St. Joseph, the oldest plat in the county. The seat of justice was fixed at Jonesville by the governor’s proclamation in February 1831 and stayed until 1843, when Hillsdale took it. The Sibley mill on the river two miles south, built in 1831 or 1832, was the first in the county; Levi Baxter and Cook Sisson built a mill at Jonesville in 1834, and Isaac B. Taylor and George C. Munro started a foundry in 1836–37 that first ran on a horse in a treadwheel and later made the ‘Michigan plow.’ Lewis Emery built the county’s first carding mill there in 1843. The county’s first newspaper, the Hillsdale County Gazette, was begun at Jonesville on April 13, 1839.
The legislature incorporated the village of Jonesville on February 10, 1855, and Munro, who is said to have built the first brick house in the county, was its first president. Ebenezer O. Grosvenor, who came as a clerk in 1840 and founded the bank of Grosvenor & Co. in 1854, became lieutenant governor in 1864 and state treasurer in 1866. J. J. Deal’s carriage works, later one of the village’s chief employers, made carriages, wagons and sleighs.
Jonesville became a home rule city on August 14, 2014. The 2020 census counted 2,176 people there.
