Coopersville: Timber Town Turned Farm Town

In eighteen forty-five, a man named Benjamin Cooper from Utica, New York purchased a large tract in northeast Ottawa County, drawn by one thing: timber. The forests were dense, the Grand River was close enough to float logs downstream to Grand Haven, and there was money to be made. Cooper built a sawmill, the settlement took his name, and the railroad came through in the years that followed, sealing Coopersville's future.

Once the forests were cut, the cleared land became farmland, and Coopersville evolved from a lumber town into an agricultural one. It incorporated as a village in eighteen seventy-one. Today it is a small city of nearly five thousand people, sitting alongside Interstate Ninety-Six about halfway between Grand Rapids and the Lake Michigan shore.