Mattawan, Michigan

In the eighteen forties, a railroad agent arrived in Van Buren County to buy right-of-way for the Michigan Central Railroad. The station stop was named Mattawan, reportedly after the town of Mattewan on the Hudson River in New York, where some of the earliest settlers in the area are said to have lived before moving west. A sawmill had already been started here, and Euro-American families had been trickling in since the mid-eighteen thirties, after Potawatomi bands ceded the region in the Treaty of Chicago in eighteen thirty-three. The railroad locked in Mattawan's location and gave this small Van Buren County village its permanent identity.