Centreville, Michigan has a lot of similarities to Cassopolis, which sits about twenty-six miles due west on M-60 and is home to the last Michigan courthouse we talked about a month and a half ago. Both towns -villages, technically- have fewer than two thousand residents and, despite their statuses as county seats, both have long been surpassed in size and prominence by other cities in their counties: Dowagiac grew while Cassopolis didn’t, and Sturgis and Three Rivers overtook Centreville in a similar fashion.
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The Cass County, Michigan Courthouse (1899-2003)
Cassopolis, Michigan has a highfalutin name. For many years, it was all I knew about the place aside from my assumption that Cassopolis Street in Elkhart probably went there. A couple of years ago, I had an opportunity to test my theory, and it was successful! But any thoughts about the community’s purported stature went out the car window as soon as I arrived: I wasn’t expecting some sprawling metropolis like Kalamazoo or Saginaw, but Cassopolis -officially the Village of Cassopolis- has a population of only around 1,600 people. There’s a couple of rows of old storefronts, a New Formalist bank from the 1960s, a True Value hardware store, and an old school greasy-spoon called The Twirl. There’s also a massive courthouse right at the corner of M-60 and M-62.
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