Coldwater: The Chicago Road, the Artillery Battery, and Thirteen Million Cigars

Coldwater, Michigan takes its name from an Potawatomi phrase meaning cold water, a reference to the spring-fed creek that runs through the center of town. Long before the first European settler arrived, Potawatomi people had lived along this waterway; in eighteen twenty-one, Chief Topinabee and his people ceded the land that would become Branch County, though they remained on reservations for several more years.

The Chicago Road made Coldwater. The territorial highway, running from Detroit southwest through Michigan to Chicago, was the main artery of settlement across the southern tier of the territory, and in eighteen thirty, little clusters of houses began appearing along it, including the first structures at Coldwater. Hugh Campbell built the settlement's first house near the cold creek that year. Within a decade Coldwater was incorporated as a village, and by eighteen forty-two it had become the permanent county seat of Branch County, winning out over the village of Branch itself.

The Civil War left a distinctive mark on this small city. By the eighteen fifties, Coldwater had become a notable center for horse breeding and training, and when the Union Army came calling for cavalry and artillery animals, local breeders supplied roughly three thousand horses to the federal forces. The city's own contribution to the war effort came in the form of what became one of the most celebrated artillery units in the western theater. The Coldwater Light Artillery had been organized as a militia battery in eighteen fifty-seven, and when the war broke out it tendered its service as a body, mustering into federal service in April eighteen sixty-one. Under the command of Cyrus Loomis, who rose from captain to brevet brigadier general, Loomis' Battery, as it was known, fought at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and the Siege of Chattanooga, building a reputation as one of the finest light artillery batteries in the Army of the Cumberland.

After the war, the town found a new industry in an unlikely place: cigars. By eighteen seventy, cigar making had grown so prevalent that workers organized the Coldwater Cigar Makers Union, one of the earliest trade unions in Michigan. By eighteen eighty-two, factories here were turning out thirteen point four million cigars a year, making Coldwater a genuinely significant manufacturing center in the regional economy of the Gilded Age.

The old Chicago Road still runs through town, now carrying a different name but the same alignment, threading past brick storefronts that date to those prosperous postwar decades.