TITUS “POTATO” BRONSON 

By Linda L. Bonzo

This article first appeared in the September/October 1990 issue of Michigan History.

On a summer day in 1829, a tall, lanky man crossed the Kalamazoo River at the trading post and traveled until he reached an Indian mound. It was here he decided to establish his town. After spending the summer in a shelter built of tamarack poles roofed with grass, he traveled to the settlement at Prairie Ronde where he spent the winter. The following spring, Titus Bronson left for Ohio to bring his wife and family to their new home. His vision and drive resulted in the founding of Kalamazoo.

Born near Middlebury, Connecticut, in 1788, Bronson was forty-one when he moved to Tallmadge, Ohio, a community near Akron. There, Bronson met an Indiana Hoosier who was growing a new variety of potato called “Neshannock.” Bronson bought some of these potatoes and grew a successful crop. He became so successful that “Potato Bronson” moved from town to town raising and selling the new variety.

The spring of 1823 found Bronson in Ann Arbor, where he purchased a couple of parcels of land in Washtenaw County. He worked the summer in a sawmill and on a farm in Oakland County and spent the winter with an Ann Arbor family before moving his holdings to Washtenaw County in 1824.

Henry Osterhout, an Ann Arbor pioneer, claimed that Bronson was “the first man who brought potatoes to Ann Arbor—you could not get them from Detroit or anywhere.”

After successfully farming for a few years, Bronson returned to Connecticut and married Sarah “Sally” Richardson on New Year’s Day 1827. Bronson and Sally returned to Tallmadge, Ohio, where their daughter Eliza was born. But Titus was unable to remain in any one place for long, and in 1828 he joined a surveying party in Ann Arbor heading west. His dream was to establish a town, and he was searching for a prime location.

He found it the summer of 1829. A wise choice for a town site, the land was located near the fork of the Kalamazoo River. Several Indian trails converged there, and it lay along the route of the Territorial Road that ran between Detroit and St. Joseph.

In 1831 the Bronsons moved to Titus’ claim and set up housekeeping in a log house. Once his family was settled, Bronson visited the land office in White Pigeon and entered eighty acres in his wife’s name, while Steven Richardson, Bronson’s brother-in-law, entered eighty acres in his own name. Titus named the 160-acre tract of land Bronson.

After the land was surveyed and laid out in town lots, Bronson offered free lots for a courthouse, school, jail and the first four church organizations to inquire. He petitioned to have his town declared the county seat, knowing that the courthouse would draw professional men, as well as merchants to supply the needs of a growing town.

The village of Bronson got off to a slow start. Titus failed to find buyers for his lots and reluctantly turned to partners to help raise badly needed funds. The most prominent of these partners were future U.S. Senator Lucius Lyon and Justus Burdick, who bought a half-interest in the village for $850.

The post office was established in 1832. That year also witnessed the town’s first recorded election, which was held at Bronson’s home. Bronson experienced its first real growth in 1834 when the land office was moved there from White Pigeon. People lined up in the early morning darkness to enter their claims when the office opened. In 1836 the Bronson land office sold more acres of land than any other land office in the history of the United States.

Titus often talked of his dreams and plans for the future of the town. When a cynic scoffed “in twenty years the tired and hungry traveler wandering this way would not be able to find a solitary hut in Bronson.” Titus responded indignantly, “in twenty years from this time you will see a large city here and you will be able to go to and from Detroit in one day by the railroad cars.” He was right. The Michigan Central railway reached Bronson in 1846. 

In 1836 several prominent Bronson citizens changed the village’s name to Kalamazoo. According to Dr. Foster Pratt, Kalamazoo postmaster during the 1860s,“While the post office here was ‘Bronson,’ there was one in Branch County . . . called ‘Bronson Prairie.’ The problem was solved by our city taking on its present melodious name and Bronson Prairie lopping off the Prairie.”

Whatever the reason for the name change, Titus Bronson was regarded by some as an eccentric, if not downright obnoxious. He held strong opinions about everything, and he was especially outspoken against the imbibing of alcohol. He presented a generally slovenly appearance, was thin and nervous, and he had a lame leg that troubled him most of his life. He had a habit of talking too fast and of repeating phrases over and over. He was extremely absentminded when preoccupied.

The Bronsons left Michigan in 1836, probably because of the town’s name change. But there is evidence that Titus had planned to leave earlier. In seven years the settlement had grown into a town of nearly a thousand people. The place was indeed becoming “too thick,” and Titus began to feel the pull of the frontier once again.

The Bronsons moved to Illinois where they operated a hotel in Freeport, a community northwest of Chicago. Their daughters, Eliza and Julia, married Illinois men and settled there. Titus and Sally eventually settled on a farm near Davenport, Iowa. But Bronson lost the property in the 1840s; according to Kalamazoo historian A.D.P. Van Buren, “he was swindled out of his title.” Sally Bronson died soon after losing the farm.

Titus returned to Illinois to live with Eliza. In the fall of 1852, while visiting relatives in Middlebury, Connecticut, he became ill and died. He was buried in Middlebury, his tombstone reads: “A Western Pioneer, Returned to Sleep with his Fathers.”

Bronson left an enduring mark on the town he founded. In the words of Cyrus Lovell, Bronson’s lawyer and personal friend, “He kept everyone who came to his house, especially the ministers; was a friend to the religion of the Bible and to the human race; was just and liberal, and ready always to do his share in any public work. . . . In short Titus Bronson was an honest, good, and useful man.”