The Methodist Episcopal Church
This church still stands between Second Street and Third Street on Elm Street.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sunday, August 19, 2012
The top photo shows cars that were for sale lined up along Elm Street.
The middle photo show the property in 2006.
The Armstrong House, First and Ash Streets
This is probably the oldest second story house in Copemish. It is still
standing on the corner of First and Ash Streets. The current owner, Dick
Szelepski, showed me an 1897 document deeding the house from Henry
Ellis and wife to Abram Armstrong and wife. He thinks that one of the
founders of the village, Buckley or Douglas, may have built the house
for a daughter who was of marriagable age.
Abram Armstrong's, son, Henry, was a professional photographer. Henry also lived in this house and built his studio across the street.
Abram Armstrong's, son, Henry, was a professional photographer. Henry also lived in this house and built his studio across the street.
1991 Newspaper Article
There is no date or newspaper name with this article. I am assuming that it was written for the Copemish Centennial and that it was printed in the Manistee Advocate.Copemish – The First Village
A hundred years ago on February 10, 1891, Copemish elected a village council and became an incorporated village in Manistee County. The irony of this first is that Copemish was also the newest village in the county of 1891.
Surveyors for the Toledo, Ann Arbor & Northern Michigan and the Manistee & Northeastern railroads had determined the location for the future village by fixing a point where their two lines intersected. The first residents of Copemish had arrived in the summer of 1889 to serve the needs of construction crews for both the railroads. The surveyors concluded their work by plating a portion of the railroad owned property at the intersection of the tracks as a village.
Copemish developed very rapidly due to the fact it was a transportation community built in a virtual vacuum. The pioneers of the community had had to walk 30 to 50 miles for all their outside needs; politics, legal problems, medical help, supplies, grist mills and often even churches. Produce from the homesteads had to be freighted to market a like distance unless they could find a closer logging camp. Consequently, with the arrival of not one but two railroads in 1889, the local people rushed to use the transportation center and the junction quickly became a sizable community.
State law specified that whenever a community of more than 300 people lived in an area of less than a square mile they could petition the county Board of Supervisors to become an incorporated village. Copemish met this requirement by 1891 (318 people in one square mile) and thus 15 residents filed a petition with the Supervisors at their organizational meeting in 1891. The petition was granted on January 7, 1891, with the actual incorporated village to commence after an election of officers on February 10th.
Following the election the Manistee Times-Sentinel carried the following proud announcement from a Copemish correspondent:
“The village of Copemish contains about four hundred inhabitants, and
and was incorporated Tuesday, by electing the village officers. There
were three tickets in the field – Citizens, Village and Union – and the contest
was a spirited one. The Citizens Ticket was victorious, the following
officers being elected: President, C.B. Caniff; Clerk, Walter W. Gibb;
Treasurer, George H. Marzloff; Trustees, James B. Loshbough, David
Barry, Charles H. Taylor, John Tweddle, Cassius R. Bunker, Columbus
W. Kingsley; Assessor, David A. Cornell; Street Commissioner, Thomas
A. Fralick; and Constable, William Fenner.
“Copemish is a little over a year old and one of the most enterprising and
progressive villages in northern Michigan. The buildings are of a
substantial character, and everything about the village has the air of life
and vigor. The $8000 company grist mill is one of the finest in the state,
being supplied with all the modern improvements. It has given satisfaction
in every instance, and farmers come twenty and thirty miles with their
grists. Many other enterprises in and about the village are worthy of
mention.”
Second Street --
You may notice that the postcard lists this photo as a Third Street view, but we are positive it is Second Street. I am not sure if streets were renamed at some point or if the photographer made a mistake. The house in the foreground burned in the 1990's, but the middle house is still standing.According to Kim Frees, the middle house was owned by the Hendricksons in the 1950's. In later years, the house was used as a Bed and Breakfast, M & M Lodging. It was also owned by H.L Hunter and a family with the last name of Dwyer -- according to the Millirons (2012).
Village With A Colorful Past
Village With A Colorful Past
Early Settler Recalls Copemish Younger Days
By Virginia Stroemel
Special to the Herald
Sunday, September 20. 1953
MANISTEE – “Whereas on March 7, 1873, the State Legislature passed as an act entitled, “An Act to Detach the Township of Cleon from the County of Manistee and Attach the Same to the County of Wexford.”
“Whereas, the proceedings which led to this act were purely selfish and local and without the knowledge of consent of the people of Manistee County.
“Whereas Manistee County has continued to tax State taxes with Cleon Township included while Wexford County has paid no taxes on said township, though, enjoying the increased revenue from these lands, captured from us contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution and the Rights of the Free People.”
“Resolved that we earnestly urge upon the legislate the justice of at once setting back the Township of Cleon where she naturally and geographically belongs and which was secretly and clandestinely taken from us to gratify of the selfishness and greed of private individuals.”
(Taken from Proceedings of the Manistee County Board of Supervisors, January 16, 1875.)
Having indignately drawn up this formal resolution, following discovery that the County’s northeasternnmost Township had been part of, and paid taxes to, the neighboring county of Wexford for nearly two years, the Manistee County Board of Supervisors was apparently determined to get it back. But it was not until June 1881 that Cleon was once more on the Manistee County tax rolls.
Unlike other parts of the County where pine predominated, Cleon was hard timber country, rich in beech and maple, with some hemlock. According to legend, one tremendous beech tree was used as an Indian meeting place and it was this tree, since destroyed, called by the Indians Co-pem-mish, with the accent on the “pem,” which gave the Village of Copemish its name. Not far from its spreading branches and tremendous bole, two railroads raced each other to meet and form the junction of the Toledo and Ann Arbor and the Manistee and the Northeastern. It was the M and NE, which won the race, reaching Copemish in the Fall of 1889.
The Village, principally homesteaders and lumberers, grew amazingly fast – sometimes as many as 40 or 50 persons arrived in one day to settle here. There was plenty of business – saw mills, grist mills, a factory, followed quickly by stores of all kinds, drugs, hardware, groceries, dress-making, and millinery. There were several boarding houses and three hotels.
Sam O. Cooley started a newspaper, The Copemish Courier, later the Copemish Progress. In addition to Society Hall, the meeting place for numerous religious and fraternal organizations, a Mr. Harrington and Mr. Freeland built an Opera House.
Obviously, the Village needed a school and in the Fall of 1889, every child old enough to toddle was rounded up to attend classes, in order to have the required number of pupils to secure State recognition – a sort of pre-20th century school-roll padding.
It was about this time that the Congregational Church was organized, later followed by the Methodist, with which the other one ______ a church building constructed in _____ a good many years after this At. Raphael’s Catholic Church was built.
The early days in Copemish are well remembered by Edna Ball Durham who came here with her family when she was about six years old. She recalls that her father traded a pair of mules for 40 acres of land, when _________were a bit better off financially ______ bought an adjoining pair of 40’s for she _____ about $1.00 and acre. As a child she walked two and one half miles through the deep forest _____ to the Post Office to get the mail.
When she was 18, having studied to be a teacher, she applied for the Village ____ post for $20 but was underbid by another young woman who got it for $18 a month. ______
_________________________.
Mrs. Durham is the possessor of several old and yellowed newspapers, among them an 1894 copy of Sam Cooley’s Copemish Courier, filled with such interesting items, as “Pearl Price accidentally cut the end of one of her fingers off one day this week while peeling squash,” and , “If the young people of this place would attend prayer meetings more regular and stop ‘carousing’ it would be far better for their moral character.” And another with a slightly wistful tone, “Many dollars on subscriptions ($1.00 per year in advance) are due us from parties who we have reason to believe have plenty of money. Please pay up and help us out at once and thus greatly oblige your humble servant. Farmers will remember we are anxious to receive first-class farm produce in payment.”
“I guess the men who built the Opera House had big ideas of what Copemish was going to be,” says Mrs. Durham, a white-haired little lady whose home is next to the Methodist Church. “To my knowledge there was never any professional entertainment there – certainly no operas – but they used to have home talent plays and dances. Afterward, it was sold for a grocery and hardware store and finally wrecked.”
The newspaper office, now probably the oldest building standing in the Village, later became a shoe store and is now the annex of the church.
Copemish today is a pleasant little village of white frame houses, surrounded by farms where strawberries, gladioli and potatoes are the main crops. Few old buildings remain and ___ originally little wooden schoolhouse has given place to a large brick one with shop and gymnasium in separate buildings. There is an enrollment of 228, all of legal school age, now, and 11 teachers in addition to the surperintendent.
The big timber, of course, is gone, but the Village boasts a fine park and picnic place, shaded by good-sized, second-growth trees and reforestation projects are reclaiming many outlying, eroded areas.
Today, as when Edna Ball came here as a small child, Cleon Township is still a “good place to raise a family” which, she says, seemed to be the reason many discharged soldiers of the Civil War home-steaded here originally.
Early Settler Recalls Copemish Younger Days
By Virginia Stroemel
Special to the Herald
Sunday, September 20. 1953
MANISTEE – “Whereas on March 7, 1873, the State Legislature passed as an act entitled, “An Act to Detach the Township of Cleon from the County of Manistee and Attach the Same to the County of Wexford.”
“Whereas, the proceedings which led to this act were purely selfish and local and without the knowledge of consent of the people of Manistee County.
“Whereas Manistee County has continued to tax State taxes with Cleon Township included while Wexford County has paid no taxes on said township, though, enjoying the increased revenue from these lands, captured from us contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution and the Rights of the Free People.”
“Resolved that we earnestly urge upon the legislate the justice of at once setting back the Township of Cleon where she naturally and geographically belongs and which was secretly and clandestinely taken from us to gratify of the selfishness and greed of private individuals.”
(Taken from Proceedings of the Manistee County Board of Supervisors, January 16, 1875.)
Having indignately drawn up this formal resolution, following discovery that the County’s northeasternnmost Township had been part of, and paid taxes to, the neighboring county of Wexford for nearly two years, the Manistee County Board of Supervisors was apparently determined to get it back. But it was not until June 1881 that Cleon was once more on the Manistee County tax rolls.
Unlike other parts of the County where pine predominated, Cleon was hard timber country, rich in beech and maple, with some hemlock. According to legend, one tremendous beech tree was used as an Indian meeting place and it was this tree, since destroyed, called by the Indians Co-pem-mish, with the accent on the “pem,” which gave the Village of Copemish its name. Not far from its spreading branches and tremendous bole, two railroads raced each other to meet and form the junction of the Toledo and Ann Arbor and the Manistee and the Northeastern. It was the M and NE, which won the race, reaching Copemish in the Fall of 1889.
The Village, principally homesteaders and lumberers, grew amazingly fast – sometimes as many as 40 or 50 persons arrived in one day to settle here. There was plenty of business – saw mills, grist mills, a factory, followed quickly by stores of all kinds, drugs, hardware, groceries, dress-making, and millinery. There were several boarding houses and three hotels.
Sam O. Cooley started a newspaper, The Copemish Courier, later the Copemish Progress. In addition to Society Hall, the meeting place for numerous religious and fraternal organizations, a Mr. Harrington and Mr. Freeland built an Opera House.
Obviously, the Village needed a school and in the Fall of 1889, every child old enough to toddle was rounded up to attend classes, in order to have the required number of pupils to secure State recognition – a sort of pre-20th century school-roll padding.
It was about this time that the Congregational Church was organized, later followed by the Methodist, with which the other one ______ a church building constructed in _____ a good many years after this At. Raphael’s Catholic Church was built.
The early days in Copemish are well remembered by Edna Ball Durham who came here with her family when she was about six years old. She recalls that her father traded a pair of mules for 40 acres of land, when _________were a bit better off financially ______ bought an adjoining pair of 40’s for she _____ about $1.00 and acre. As a child she walked two and one half miles through the deep forest _____ to the Post Office to get the mail.
When she was 18, having studied to be a teacher, she applied for the Village ____ post for $20 but was underbid by another young woman who got it for $18 a month. ______
_________________________.
Mrs. Durham is the possessor of several old and yellowed newspapers, among them an 1894 copy of Sam Cooley’s Copemish Courier, filled with such interesting items, as “Pearl Price accidentally cut the end of one of her fingers off one day this week while peeling squash,” and , “If the young people of this place would attend prayer meetings more regular and stop ‘carousing’ it would be far better for their moral character.” And another with a slightly wistful tone, “Many dollars on subscriptions ($1.00 per year in advance) are due us from parties who we have reason to believe have plenty of money. Please pay up and help us out at once and thus greatly oblige your humble servant. Farmers will remember we are anxious to receive first-class farm produce in payment.”
“I guess the men who built the Opera House had big ideas of what Copemish was going to be,” says Mrs. Durham, a white-haired little lady whose home is next to the Methodist Church. “To my knowledge there was never any professional entertainment there – certainly no operas – but they used to have home talent plays and dances. Afterward, it was sold for a grocery and hardware store and finally wrecked.”
The newspaper office, now probably the oldest building standing in the Village, later became a shoe store and is now the annex of the church.
Copemish today is a pleasant little village of white frame houses, surrounded by farms where strawberries, gladioli and potatoes are the main crops. Few old buildings remain and ___ originally little wooden schoolhouse has given place to a large brick one with shop and gymnasium in separate buildings. There is an enrollment of 228, all of legal school age, now, and 11 teachers in addition to the surperintendent.
The big timber, of course, is gone, but the Village boasts a fine park and picnic place, shaded by good-sized, second-growth trees and reforestation projects are reclaiming many outlying, eroded areas.
Today, as when Edna Ball came here as a small child, Cleon Township is still a “good place to raise a family” which, she says, seemed to be the reason many discharged soldiers of the Civil War home-steaded here originally.
History Meets The Blog
It is my hope to transcribe notes, photos and articles relating to the Michigan town of Copemish and the Cleon Township area. The Copemish Area Historical Society has a collection of historical photos and articles, and I will add them to this blog as time permits. I would certainly appreciate gathering additional photos and information from you! If you have photos, newspaper clippings, documents, or articles that you would like to share, please scan them and email me at marrobinson2000@yahoo.com.
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