The story
Welcome to Lawrence
Lawrence was laid out in 1835 by John Allen of Ann Arbor as the village of Mason, was known for years as Brush Creek after the stream that ran its mills, and took the township’s name. It made a bid for the county seat in 1854 and waited until 1877 for its railroad.
Lawrence Township, town 3 south, range 15 west, was heavily timbered with beech, maple, whitewood and black walnut. Brush Creek, the chief tributary of the Paw Paw in the township, gave the village its water power, and Prospect Lake, earlier called Crystal Lake, drew anglers. In 1880 settlers could still point to traces of Indian mounds on sections 7 and 18, three of them near Sutton’s Lake, each about four feet high and twenty feet across.
In June 1835 John Allen of Ann Arbor entered forty acres on section 10, laid out a village and called it Mason, for the governor of Michigan. Ephraim Palmer and his wife reached the place that August and raised a cabin on Brush Creek, but left within a month. John Reynolds took over the cabin, and on November 15, 1835, it sheltered a party of eleven newcomers, among them Eaton Branch and Dexter Gibbs’s family. Allen then built a double log tavern, kept by Gibbs until his death in 1838. Allen held the mail contract between Kalamazoo and St. Joseph, ran it through Mason, and in January 1836 started a stage line west to Keeler; the post office opened in 1837 with Horace Stimson as postmaster.
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Allen and John R. Haynes built a sawmill in 1836, and Haynes kept a store in its upper story where, it was said, half the customers were Indians. Growth was slow: in 1843 the place had ten families and was known as Brush Creek. John R. Baker, who took over the village property under Allen’s mortgage, renamed it Lawrence after the township and is said to have sent a traveler asking for Brush Creek off to Chadwick’s mill, telling him not to call ‘my bright little village by the ugly name of Brush Creek.’
In October 1854 the board of supervisors named Lawrence as the new county seat and put the question to the voters; Paw Paw kept the seat by promising to build a jail at its own cost. Lawrence was incorporated by an act approved March 24, 1869, and 139 votes were cast at the first village election, on May 3, 1869, in Chadwick’s Hall. Railroad schemes failed until the narrow-gauge Toledo and South Haven line from Paw Paw was finished, and the first train reached Lawrence on September 15, 1877. Cider, cider jelly and dried apples were made near the depot by 1880.
The 2020 census counted 964 people in the village.
