The story
Welcome to Mendon
Mendon began with French traders at a post on the south bank of the St. Joseph River, among the Potawatomi of the Nottawa-seepe reservation. The village itself grew on the north bank after a millrace brought water power in 1844, and its brick Wakeman House and old truss bridge still recall the nineteenth-century town.
The first settlers were French. In 1831 Francois Moutan and his family came to take charge of a trading post that Peter and J. J. Godfroi had opened on the south bank of the St. Joseph, on the Nottawa-seepe reservation, set aside for the Potawatomi in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821. In August 1833 Patrick Marantette, born of French parents near Detroit, took over the post, and in 1835 he married Moutan’s daughter Frances. The Potawatomi gave up the reservation by treaty in 1833, and Everts says it was largely through Marantette’s efforts that most of them were gathered and removed to the west in 1840. Leander Metha, another Frenchman, came from Monroe in 1834 and settled on the north bank, on the site of the present village.
Metha’s first rough cabin later served as a school, but the place grew slowly until 1844, when Bronson and Doan dammed the Little Portage River and brought its water through the marshes to the bank of the St. Joseph, where they built a sawmill with a sixteen-foot head of water. On November 22, 1845, Metha platted Mendon on the east half of section 27, and Marantette and others added to it. In 1848 the mill passed to Melvin and Eldredge Brown of Centreville, who added a lathe and began making chairs and furniture; stave and barrel-head works, planing mills and sash and door factories followed.
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Catholic services began at the trading post. Cutler says Father Charles Boss, traveling from Detroit to Grand Rapids in 1837, laid the foundations of St. Edward’s congregation, and that for twenty years the white and Native families gathered for Mass in the Marantette house whenever a priest could come, many of them Holy Cross fathers who rode sixty miles each way. The first bridge over the river in the village, the Marantette bridge, was built in 1873; the steel truss that now stands there replaced it about 1900.
Mendon was first incorporated in 1858; the corporation lapsed, was renewed in 1870, and was renewed again by special act of the legislature in 1875. In 1873 Adams Wakeman made enough brick to build a large hotel, still known as the Wakeman House. By 1911 Mendon was a village of about nine hundred people at the crossing of the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad and the air-line division of the Michigan Central, shipping grain, livestock and essential oils, with a creamery, an opera house built in 1881, and churches of Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and Adventists.
The Mendon Township Free Public Library was organized on April 25, 1889, by the Ladies’ Literary Society, and in 1906 it moved into its own building, built with help from the Carnegie fund; it is still in use and is a state historic site. The 2020 census counted 881 people in the village.
