Bronson Park and the Town That Changed Its Founder's Name

The park at the center of downtown Kalamazoo carries the name of the man who founded this city. But for most of his life, the city itself did not. That is a peculiar way to honor someone, and the story behind it tells you something about the rough democracy of a frontier town.

Titus Bronson arrived here on June twenty-first, eighteen twenty-nine, a transplanted Connecticut Yankee who had drifted west through New York and Ohio before finding his way to the Kalamazoo River. He built a cabin, obtained a federal land patent with his brother-in-law, and platted the village in eighteen thirty-one. He called it the Town of Bronson. The county recorder misspelled it Brunson in the official records, but the intent was clear.

Governor Lewis Cass chose Bronson's settlement as the Kalamazoo County seat two weeks after the plat was recorded. The designation was a windfall. A county seat meant courts, officials, travelers, commerce. The little town began to grow.

Then, in March of eighteen thirty-six, Bronson's neighbors voted to change the name. The official reason was that the name Bronson was too easily confused with Bronson, Ohio. But local accounts suggest something more personal, a community dissatisfied with its founder, who had developed a reputation for eccentricity and antagonism. One account records a fine assessed against him for stealing a cherry tree from a neighbor's yard. Whether the charge was serious or satirical, the result was final. The town became Kalamazoo.

Bronson left. He wandered west, lost money in Iowa, and eventually returned to Connecticut, where he died in eighteen fifty-three, far from the county seat that had shed his name. The park in the heart of downtown was later named in his memory, a belated acknowledgment from the city that outlasted him. Abraham Lincoln spoke in this park in eighteen fifty-six. Civil War rallies gathered here. Tornadoes stripped its ancient oaks. And Titus Bronson's name, at least, survived in the park he never got to see named for him.