The story
Welcome to Litchfield
Litchfield grew around the sawmill Hervey Smith built on the St. Joseph River in 1836, on the village plat he laid out beside it. Its name was carried to the legislature by the settler Henry Stevens against the wishes of a township meeting. The railroad of 1872 doubled its trade, and it became a village in 1877 and a city in 1970.
Until the spring of 1834, the 1879 county history says, the St. Joseph flowed here ‘without any mill-dams to obstruct it.’ That spring Henry Stevens settled on section 13 and Samuel Riblet on section 15, and on May 20, 1834, the first furrow was turned on Stevens’s farm with every inhabitant of the township present: Stevens and his two hired men and Samuel and Solomon Riblet, who all took turns at the plow. Riblet built his cabin of logs small enough for him and his wife to raise alone, while A. K. Bushnell brought men from Homer, some over ten miles, to raise his. There was no school or church nearer than Marshall, and the settlers went there to mill.
The township lay in the hunting grounds of what the history calls the Leathernose family, a branch of Baw Beese’s band of Potawatomi, some forty or fifty people who wintered in the forests of Butler and Girard in Branch County and camped on the openings in summer. Their chief camping ground and corn field was on section 9; when Bushnell plowed up the planting ground and sowed it to wheat, they stopped planting and bought what they needed with berries, peltry and baskets until they were removed west of the Mississippi. The first sermon was preached by the missionary Stephen Wilcox in Riblet’s log house in June 1835, to seven hearers.
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In the summer of 1836 Hervey Smith bought sixty-five acres on sections 10 and 15, built a sawmill and platted the village. A mail route between Jonesville and Marshall opened that May, and in the fall a post office was set up with Smith as postmaster; the mail came on an Indian pony ridden by Henry Dorsey of Homer, a boy of about thirteen, mostly along an Indian trail. Smith sold the mill and water power to George C. Munro of Jonesville, who built a flouring mill in 1841. When a meeting in the winter of 1836 chose the name Columbus for the new township, Henry Stevens, ‘a turbulent man,’ sent up a rival petition for Litchfield and went to Detroit, where he won the legislature over ‘by the free use of liquid and other arguments.’ The township was organized in April 1837.
Malarial fevers raged from the summer of 1839 for about ten years, and in September 1840 more than sixty people were sick at once in a population of fewer than four hundred. The Baptist church was organized on March 16, 1839, and the Presbyterian church on July 14, 1839; the latter became Congregational, and its red-brick Gothic church of 1870 still stands on North Chicago Street. A union school was organized in 1853, and the Litchfield Gazette began in October 1874.
The village grew slowly, the 1879 history says, until the Lansing branch of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad was finished in the spring of 1872; after that its business more than doubled. Litchfield was incorporated as a village in the spring of 1877, with its first election in Millsom’s Hall on March 12 and L. A. Howard as president, and by 1879 it had about a thousand people, two flouring mills, a foundry and a bank. Rose Hartwick Thorpe wrote her curfew poem there in 1865, a 1934 marker records. Litchfield became a city in 1970; the 2020 census counted 1,399 people.
