Tag Rural Michigan

The Branch County, Michigan Courthouse (1976-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 8 min.

Have you ever heard the story of Timothy Dexter, the world’s luckiest idiot? A rube from Massachusetts, he made his first fortune by buying up huge sums of worthless Contintental currency that the government unexpectedly made good on after the American Revolution. Fortune in hand, he took his jealous rivals’ sarcastic advice to send bed warmers and woolen mittens to the tropical West Indies. Amazingly, the bed warmers were sold as molasses ladles and the mittens were gobbled up by Asian merchants to export to Siberia1! Other transactions involving sending gloves to Polynesia, Bibles to the East Indies, and stray cats to the Caribbean all worked out in his favor, and Timothy Dexter died a rich man in 1806. I mention the guy because it’s only by a similar series of events that the town of Coldwater, Michigan ever became the seat of Branch County.

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The St. Joseph County, Michigan Courthouse (1899-)

Ted Shideler 1 Comment
Read time: 8 min.

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)

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 8 min.

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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