The fur trader who settled Ada — and Kent County — before there was a Grand Rapids

A full decade before Grand Rapids had a name, a fur trader named Rix Robinson was already living where the Thornapple River pours into the Grand — the spot that’s now downtown Ada. He came in 1821 and took over a trading post the Métis trader Madeline La Framboise had run before him. With it came her network of dealings with the Ottawa people up and down the Grand River valley. That makes Robinson the first permanent settler of what would become Kent County. He was here first.

He came less as a conqueror than as a businessman who married into the country. Robinson took Ottawa wives by Native rites and worked closely with the Ottawa villages along the rivers. Within a few years he was running a whole string of trading posts around the shores of Lake Michigan. When Kent County was formally organized, the settlers made the obvious choice and elected him their first township supervisor. The new government’s first office went to the man who’d been on the ground longest.

Beaver hats went out of fashion and the fur trade dried up, but Robinson stayed. People around the Grand River knew him for decades as “Uncle Rix.” He lived out his life in the area he’d opened, and died in 1875 at well past eighty.

Stand on the bridge in Ada today, where the Thornapple slides into the bigger Grand, and you’re looking at the founding spot of the whole county — a quiet river junction that was a frontier crossroads when “Grand Rapids” was still just a set of rapids with no town beside them.