The story
Welcome to Colon
Colon sits on the narrow neck of land between Sturgeon and Palmer lakes, and it owes its odd name to a pioneer who opened a dictionary. A mill village for a century, it became known in the 1930s as the home of the Abbott Magic Company, and it calls itself the Magic Capital of the World.
The Schellhous brothers of Ohio founded the place. In April 1831 a party of thirty-one people, three Schellhous families and George Brooks’s family among them, set out for St. Joseph County and arrived on May 16. One brother had bought the mill site on Swan Creek, between the lakes, and within a week he had a cabin built with a door made from a wagon box. Charles Palmer came that fall and wintered in the same one-room cabin before building his own on the lake that now bears his name. A sawmill was running in 1832, though the dam washed out twice that year.
George Schellhous and Hatch, an Indian trader, laid out a village in 1832, but the plat was never recorded. When the founders were looking for a name, the 1877 county history says, one of them opened a dictionary to the word ‘colon,’ read its anatomical meaning, and declared that the lake and the river lay exactly like the colon, so Colon it was; the township took the same name. Dr. Isaac S. Voorhis built the first frame house in 1836, bought the Schellhous mill site, and finished a flour mill in 1839, and Charles L. Miller opened the first store in 1841. The first recorded plat was surveyed by John H. and William F. Bowman on January 5, 1844.
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Colon’s standing as a town was not assured until the railroad came. Township people raised $42,000 in subscriptions for the Michigan Air Line, later part of the Michigan Central, and its arrival in 1871 was celebrated on the Fourth of July. In 1858 citizens organized the Colon Seminary Company, which built a three-story brick school in 1862; the building served the union school district from 1871 and in 1889 became the main plant of the Lamb Knit Goods Company, which made gloves and mittens on Isaac W. Lamb’s knitting machine. An opera house block was finished in 1897, and the village library was founded that same year.
By 1911 Colon had about a thousand people and a new union school, built in 1907 for $25,000. It was incorporated as a village in 1904. In 1934 the magician Percy Abbott, an Australian and a friend of Harry Blackstone, founded the Abbott Magic Company in Colon with Recil Bordner. Blackstone made his home in Colon and is buried there, and Abbott’s Magic Get-Together brings magicians to the village every August. Abbott’s still sells and builds magic in Colon, and the old seminary and knit goods building and the public library are state historic sites. The 2020 census counted 1,199 people in the village.
