The story
Welcome to Three Rivers
Three Rivers grew up where the Rocky and Portage rivers flow into the St. Joseph, and the water power of the three made it the county’s leading manufacturing town. Four early plats were gathered into one corporation, which became a city in 1895.
The first settler on the site was Jacob McInterfer, who came from Wayne County, Ohio, in the spring of 1829 and took a square mile on the west side of the Rocky River, where the city’s Third Ward now lies. George Buck followed in 1830 and built a double log house on what became the Second Ward; it served as the township’s first tavern, and the first political convention in the county met there, with Mrs. Buck cooking dinner for seventy-five guests. Mishael Beadle bought McInterfer’s mill site after his death in 1831, finished his sawmill, and built the first frame house in the city in 1832, in the neighborhood people called ‘Canada.’
Several towns were laid out before one took hold. Christopher Shinnaman platted Moab on July 28, 1830, and the next June Buck and McInterfer laid out a village called St. Joseph, where the county seat was first located. When the seat went instead to Centreville, Moab went back to cornfields. On November 25, 1836, John H. Bowman platted Three Rivers between the Portage and the Rocky, and a month later George Buck, Jonathan Brown, Benjamin Sherman, Edward Pierson and L. B. Brown platted Lockport on the east side, with plans for a canal and a great water power.
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Bowman, with partners from Prairie Ronde, started the Three Rivers flour mill in February 1837. The St. Joseph Canal and Lockport Manufacturing Company advertised in May 1837 for builders of a dam, bridge, canal and lock, but the panic of that year stopped the work. Until railroads came, flour went down the St. Joseph in flat-bottomed arks; one early cargo of a hundred barrels went all the way to Chicago and sold for nine hundred dollars. Arks ran to the mouth of the river until the railroad reached Niles in 1849, and then to Niles; when the Michigan Southern reached Constantine in 1853, flatboats carried freight only that far, and the same year the railroad built a branch line to Three Rivers.
The village was incorporated by the legislature on February 13, 1855, and in 1871 its limits took in Lockport as the Second Ward, ‘Canada’ as the Third and the land east of the Portage as the Fourth. The Michigan Central Air Line came through in 1871, and Three Rivers became a city in 1895. Paper making began with the Rosette mill of 1853–54 and continued with the Eddy Paper Company. By 1911 the Sheffield Car Company covered forty acres in the Second Ward, employed twelve hundred men, and built railway motor cars, velocipede cars and track tools, and the R. M. Kellogg Company claimed the largest strawberry-plant nursery in the world.
The Riverside Cemetery Association, first called Oakdale, was organized in 1858 on the north bank of the St. Joseph; a granite boulder there was dedicated to the Civil War veterans on May 30, 1903. The public library began with a few hundred volumes collected in 1887. Today downtown Three Rivers is a National Register commercial historic district, and the St. Joseph County Historical Society keeps its headquarters and archives on North Main Street. The 2020 census counted 7,973 people in the city.
