Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo lies on a river that winds westward through southern Michigan to Lake Michigan. Its name comes from an Algonquian language, though its meaning has been variously interpreted. The Potawatomi lived in the area when Europeans arrived, and fur traders wintered there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The 1821 Treaty of Chicago ceded land south of the Grand River to the United States, while reserving the village of Potawatomi chief Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish around the future town. The remaining tract was ceded in the 1827 Treaty of St Joseph. Titus Bronson settled there in 1829 and laid out a village bearing his name; in 1836 it adopted the river's name, Kalamazoo. By then, the county had already used the name for several years.