(The first of a two part series)
Goodrich – The water laps peacefully at the oars silently propelling the boat through the waters of the Goodrich Mill Pond.
Beyond the glimpse of turbid waters seen by Hegel Road fisherman is a body of water’which some would prefer be called Lake Goodrich’that winds its way along the heart of the village.
The waters of the Goodrich Mill Pond aren’t Michigan’s bluest, but to many living along its untamed banks, it’s a place of pristine beauty, a refuge to nature’s critters, a wild oasis beckoning children to a Huckleberry Finn existence.
A turtle sunning on a log drops suddenly into the calm waters as the row boat approaches, in a place where time seems a recent invention.
But, of course, the Goodrich Mill Pond hasn’t always been.
In the early 1800s, before Michigan was yet a state, when much of Atlas Township was a deep wolf-haunted forest known on maps only as ‘Town 6?, the northern-flowing Kearsley Creek ran wild.
Moses Goodrich was the eldest of six sons-and one daughter’of Levi H.Goodrich, the supervisor of Clarence, N.Y.
Weathered with the years, a photograph of Moses shows a man of energy. Eyes wide, Moses looks to have grabbed his hat and swooped it to his side. His other hand rests on his hip as if to say, ‘Take the picture already, I’ve got things to do.?
In 1835, Moses and Enos’the fourth son of Levi H.’boarded a steamer in Buffalo and stepped off in Detroit to explore. Returning home, they gave a report of the rich, heavily timbered hills and plains that convinced friends and family to invest their futures in the area.
On Feb. 11, 1836, Moses and Levi W., the third brother, set out from New York. They’d loaded up a heavy 12-foot sled with a lumber wagon and provisions, which they hitched up to the family’s beefiest oxen.
The brothers took two teams of the animals to pull the sleigh as they made their way through Canada’s winter-wracked woods and trails, making about 25 miles a day as they braved the Niagara, being met by hundreds of Indian dogs at Tecumseh’s battleground scene, and losing an ox to the thawing ice over Lake St. Clair.
Moses carried money’his own, his father’s, and money from neighbors’enough to purchase more than 1,000 acres of select land parcels.
Now on the brink of owning the desired land, Moses and his brother surveyed the rushing waters of the Detroit River. They seemed impassable, and money worries weighed heavily on Moses? mind. What if he lost it? What if it was stolen? What if someone beat them to the land office on the other side of the river and bought the land they meant to buy?
The captain of the local ferry refused to make the crossing. Finding the owner of a skiff, the brothers struck up a bargain. If, for some reason, they didn’t return with the boat, the owner of the skiff could keep their oxen.
Landing safely on the other side, Moses and Levi W. found the Detroit Land Office, paying $1.25 an acre for more than 1,000 acres.
Harnessing up their recovered oxen, the brothers traveled through Pontiac, arriving at the home of Ezra Parshall-who would be elected Atlas Township’s first clerk’located at what is now 8325 Horton Road’before building a log house of their own near Gale Road.
Not long after the Goodrich brothers? arrival, Atlas became an official township, part of Lapeer County.
Although Michigan didn’t became a state until 1837, the area’s history states Atlas Township’previously called Davisonville’was formed by an act of the state legislature approved March 23, 1836.
Moses served as moderator of the first town meeting attended by 22 residents in Atlas Township on April 4, 1836. He was named a ‘Director of the Poor? a Justice of the Peace, ‘Commissioner of the Highways, Road District No. 1? and an ‘Overseer?, while Levi W. was named a three-year school commissioner and a school inspector.
With milder weather came more settlers. The rest of the Goodrich family arrived May 20, 1836, except for Levi W. who stayed in New York until autumn to wrap up political obligations.
Summer arrived to the sounds of home-building. Thirty New York-based families’including the Carpenter, Frost, Vantine, Horton, Rhodes, Green, Swears, and Liscom families’had come to settle in the growing Atlas Township community.
That September, Enos shouldered his axe and headed east two miles to start clearing poplar trees on Kearsley Creek’s high east bank; the beginning of Goodrich.
He felled trees until nightfall, returning home to the sound of increasing wolf howls from the forest, upstream and downstream. Enos realized he’d invaded one of the worst wolf-haunts of the forest. By October, a poplar-log building stood between what is now Erie Street and downtown Hegel Road, intended as a boarding house, but later used as a dry goods store, grocery and provision store, and hall of the Atlas Debating Society.
In 1837, the town’s first frame-house, built of 8-by-8 timbers for Enos Goodrich at what is now 8049 State Road, was called ‘The Flower of Atlas?. Six years later the Goodrich family and other early settlers became Genesee County residents when Atlas, Davison, Richfield, and Forest townships were detached from Lapeer and annexed to Genesee County.
Despite the existence of a gristmill two miles away in Atlas Township, built in 1836, the Goodrich Brothers decided to have one built. In 1844 land was cleared on the shores of Kearsley Creek, and a four-story structure was built by millwright Edward Fortune, Shepard Wheeler, Noah Hull, and John French.
The mill was located on the north side of Main Street’or Hegel Road’when the road used to follow the course where a towering pine tree now stands.
?(Hegel Road) was moved because of the Mill Pond,? said Jakki Sidge, village administrator.
Completed in 1846, the E & R Mills structure included a dam, raceway, and fixtures, at the sum of $8,500.
That year, Enos was elected to Michigan’s House of Representatives, and the next year the Goodrich brothers sold the property to Jacob Hoover, who operated the mill and a tannery shop.
The mill was subsequently sold to L.P. Roberts, a Mr. Frost, and George Slade of Lapeer, who owned and operated the mill 36 years until his death in 1916. In an account written by his daughter Lila Hartwig, the Slade children played ‘up and down the high timbers of the old tannery, which lay back of the mill.?
The mill pond became a focal point of the community, a center of recreational summer fishing and boating, and ice skating parties in the winter.
In an account by Carrie Horton, a balloon ascension landing on the water and the turning of the mill’s large water- wheel were two of many fond mill pond memories.
‘I can see the farmers as they came with their loads of golden grain to get it ground into feed for the stock and flour for to make bread, pies, and cakes,? wrote Horton. ‘I can hear the rattle of the harnesses and the pounding of the horses? hooves as they came across the plank bridge. I can hear the rush of the water and turning of the millwheel. I can hear the menfolk as they talk of the weather, the crops, the news, all in the days of long ago when life was hard and people helped each other.?
The town originally was named Atlas, after the township, but Reuben Goodrich changed the name in 1849 when he became postmaster.
According to a 1970 article published in The Flint Journal, the mill went broke in 1856, and the mill and water rights to the pond were mistakenly sold, again, to Isabelle Hammond of Detroit. Levi W. Goodrich sold 25-year water rights to the pond to two of his brothers in 1836, said former Village of Goodrich attorney Gordon Caswell in the article. The rights, which expired in 1861, should not have been included in subsequent purchases, he said.
After the mill was sold, several of the Goodrich brothers moved from the area; Enos to Tuscola County, his business partner Reuben, to Traverse City. John S., a successful attorney who attended the opening of the county’s first established courts, died early. As of 1879, when cultivated fields and turnpikes replaced thick wilderness, the scream of panthers, and Indian game grounds, Moses still lived on the family’s farm.
Slade made $3,000 worth of repairs and updates to the mill, replacing the old water-driven wheel with a modern turbine wheel, and substituting roller-type grain-grinding machinery for the old stone process.
The dammed-up Kearsley Creek, now known as the Goodrich Mill Pond had become the familiar civilized face of Goodrich.
Civilization was not without its challenges, as Slade learned when a new race and bridge were undermined and washed away by the heavy rains of 1883, along with large mud turtles.
With the advent of the 20th century, new inventions would span the mill pond, further changing what had become the nucleus of Goodrich, the mill pond.
Historic information compiled from from ‘The Passage of Time, 1836-2002 History of Atlas Township? by The Goodrich-Atlas Historical Society and the Goodrich Women’s Club, archived articles from The Flint Journal, Village of Goodrich files, the Brandon Township Planning Commission site, and reports from Michigan’s DNR at www.michigan.gov/dnr.