Considered Opinions

Three Rivers, Michigan

I wasn’t born in Three Rivers but I lived there from the age of 5 years until going off to college. The town was prosperous in those days. During the 1940s and 1950s, there was a booming automobile industry in Detroit, and waves of tourists poured in from there and from the Chicago area. People traveled in the Summer to the lakes in southern Michigan – and they had the money to spend, which provided a pretty good income for the town and its residents.

When the US automobile industry began its decline from foreign competition and union demands, the town gradually shrunk to little more than half its earlier population, and businesses declined or simply vanished. The stores and businesses that managed to survive moved out of the central downtown district to the US131 bypass, where they were joined by fast-food joints and a big-box store.

Today Three Rivers is a sleepy little town with lots of vacant storefronts and plenty of “deferred maintenance” in the neighborhoods – a mere shadow of its former self. But much of its rich past can be recalled in the pages of these little books.

• Click the graphic to open each book.
• Turn pages with your mouse.
• Download pdf of either book below

 

Three Rivers The Early Years was written in 1986 by Lucile Haring and Phyllis Agosti, with contributions from Loretta Magner and Roeberta Shingledecker.

As I recall, the original printing was saddle-stitched and the pages were of rather porous print stock, so the images had lost much of their original resolution. The printing apparently had been done by the local small-town newspaper and the original offset printing plates had subsequently been destroyed by fire.

The images in the original book were barely 150 dpi, as a result of the printing process used 15 years prior. I scanned them at 1200 dpi and allowed Adobe Acrobat to down-sample them to 300 dpi^[i]The jpg algorithm can have the effect of making images seem more clear than the original resolution., which made them appear slightly more clear than the original printing, in spite of the lack of resolution in the 1986 printed pages.

The binding was upgraded to the familiar EVA method because the more modern Polyurethane Reactive (PUR) adhesive type of paper-back binding had not become readily available at the time the second printing was done.

The map with index, done by William & Robert McDonough was not part of the original book. I added those pages from materials supplied by Sheila Haring in 2001 (notes on page ix). Otherwise, the text is exactly the way Mmes. Haring, and Agosti wrote it – they both rest peacefully in Three Rivers.

See original photos also from Sheila Haring HERE and download the 109-page pdf HERE. ^[ii]Revised: June 2021
While cleaning out my barn at Patchen, I discovered another box of about 40 copies of the book, which I had set aside 20 years earlier. The Three Rivers Library didn’t want them but the St. Joseph County Historical Society did, so I shipped them out after pulling out a copy for my brother, Todd, and four copies for my high school buddy, Larry Hackenberg.

Headlight Flashes, Along The Michigan Central Line is something I resurrected from a copy I obtained from the Google Library Project, along with an actual “hard” copy of the book I found in a used book store somewhere in Northern Michigan in the mid-1990s. I have reassembled it pretty much the way I think it was originally published in 1896. You can page through it by clicking on the image or download a pdf HERE.

 

The Three Rivers Robe Tannery, was another Three Rivers legend, where my grandmother, known to all her friends as “Kitty”, worked as a seamstress when I was a kid. This was the place where hunters and trappers brought their hides to be tanned and either sold or turned into coats, gloves, and other leather items. I recall that if there happened to be a lady in Three Rivers, owning a mink coat, that would be something really special. It would be really special today as well, but for a totally different reason.

I am not sure where I got this little book but most likely it was passed down through our family. On my last visit to Three Rivers, I discovered sadly that the Tannery building, which had probably been there for well over 100 years, had been demolished.

By: Jim
Written: mid-1990s
Published: May 29, 2020