The story
Welcome to Sturgis
Sturgis grew on the prairie named for Judge John Sturgis, where the Chicago Road crossed it, and answered to Sherman and Ivanhoe before the legislature settled on its present name in 1857. Railroads, furniture factories and a city-owned power plant made it the largest city in the county.
Sturgis prairie was a nearly oval plain of about three thousand acres. On August 20, 1827, Judge John Sturgis and George Thurston broke ten acres on its eastern edge, now in Fawn River Township, sowed wheat, and went back to Monroe; they returned with their families in the spring of 1828. That summer George Buck built a log house without windows on the Chicago Road, on the site of the present city, and John B. Clarke put up a larger log house that became the first hotel on the prairie. On August 9, 1829, Buck and a man named Levi Waterman were killed when a well caved in on them, the first deaths in the county.
The settlement had no name but Sturgis prairie until 1832, when Philip H. Buck platted forty lots on both sides of the Chicago Road and called the village Sherman, after the township. In 1834 Andrew Backus laid out a plat west of Nottawa Street and, at his daughters’ wish, named it Ivanhoe, after Sir Walter Scott’s hero. Lots were sold in both villages until February 1857, when the legislature ordered everything replatted as Sturgis; the commissioners recorded the new plat on February 5, 1858. In the stagecoach years of 1836 to 1840 the Chicago Road was crowded with travelers, and Cutler says the mail through Sturgis sometimes weighed nearly fifteen hundred pounds.
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Most people expected the Michigan Southern Railroad to run through the middle of the county, but Sturgis and White Pigeon raised thirty thousand dollars and the line was built through both towns, reaching Sturgis in 1851. Jonathan G. Wait of Sturgis helped secure the right of way and built the company’s depots from Coldwater to Niles. The village was incorporated on February 12, 1855, and the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad was built north from Sturgis through the county in the late 1860s. Sturgis became a city in 1896.
By 1911 Sturgis had about 3,800 people and more than twenty factories employing about a thousand men. Furniture was the leading line: Aulsbrook & Jones, founded in 1882, and the Grobhiser and Crosby company, founded in 1887, made bedroom, dining-room and office furniture, and other plants made children’s go-carts, chairs and steel tanks. The city owned its water and light plant and was finishing a power dam on the St. Joseph River about three miles north of Centreville; it began operating in September 1911, which is why Sturgis calls itself the Electric City. A township library begun in 1846 became the city library and moved into a new Carnegie building in 1909.
The old depot now houses the Sturgis Historical Museum, and the Sturges-Young Auditorium, opened in 1955, is a state historic site. The 2020 census counted 11,082 people in the city.
