The story
Welcome to Lawton
Lawton began as ‘Paw Paw Station’ on the Michigan Central and took the name of its proprietor, Nathan Lawton of Watertown, New York, who never lived there. An iron furnace backed by General Grant and other army officers made it boom in 1867–75, and grapes made it prosper again.
Nathan Lawton of Watertown, New York, owned the land where the business part of the village stands, and when it was chosen as a station on the Michigan Central he gave ten acres for depot buildings, erected in 1848, and laid out a town. The station was called Paw Paw, or South Paw Paw. When a post office was opened in 1851, Col. Andrew Longstreet named it Lawton for the proprietor, and the name passed to the town and, in time, to the station. Lawton’s sons George W. and Charles D. Lawton lived in the village for many years.
Henry McNeil opened the first store in a log cabin on what became Main Street, selling chiefly to the railroad laborers; Longstreet set up a shoe shop in an empty laborer’s shanty, and Gilbert Johnson of Paw Paw opened ‘The Farmers’ Headquarters.’ Growth was slow: in 1854 Lawton had a hotel, two stores, a sawmill, two or three frame houses and half a dozen log cabins. The board of supervisors incorporated the village on October 15, 1858, and 75 votes were cast at the first election that December 4.
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In 1867 Maj. Joseph Walker, the Lawton brothers and Maj. T. D. Brooks, an iron miner from Lake Superior, organized the Michigan Central Iron Company with $150,000 of capital. Gen. Q. A. Gillmore was president, and Gens. Grant, Barnard and Porter were among the stockholders. The furnace started on December 24, 1867, under Henry Ford, a practical iron man and later village president, smelting Lake Superior ore landed at the company’s docks at Michigan City; the company bought about 1,500 acres of timber land besides a peat bed. About 150 men worked there, and Lawton reached some 2,000 people. Depressed iron prices stopped the works in April 1875 and they never reopened; by 1880 the village had about 800 people.
Fruit took the furnace’s place. Nathan H. Bitely had marketed peaches since about 1860, and in 1868 A. B. Jones set out a hundred Concord and Delaware vines and made the district’s first grape shipment, to Lansing. The Lawton Pomological Society was formed in April 1878, and that year Lawton shipped 50,000 to 60,000 baskets of peaches and 30 tons of grapes. After the hard years of the 1890s hundreds of farmers turned to grapes; by 1911 there were about 15,000 acres of vineyard in Antwerp and Porter townships, and Lawton shipped 1,132 carloads of grapes that season, nearly 4,000,000 eight-pound baskets. Its factories then included grape-juice plants pressing 400 to 500 tons of grapes for unfermented juice.
A short line, the Paw Paw Railroad, was built from Lawton to Paw Paw after a reorganization in 1866–67, and by 1912 the village streets were shaded with maples and bordered with cement walks. The 1910 census counted 1,042 people; the 2020 census counted 1,850.
