Why a Kalamazoo County township is named after the Alamo

There’s a township in the northwest corner of Kalamazoo County called Alamo, and yes, it’s named for that Alamo — the mission in San Antonio where Davy Crockett and roughly two hundred others died in 1836. When the settlers here organized their township in 1838, the news from Texas was barely two years old and still raw, and they chose the name to honor Colonel Crockett and his comrades who fell in the revolt of Texas against Mexico. Michigan farmers, a thousand miles from the fight, decided to remember the Alamo on a plat map.

They weren’t alone in the county, either. Just to the south, another township was set off from Brady Township that same year of 1838 and named, simply, Texas. The reasoning was of a piece: the Texans’ revolt was being read up here as a victory of free men over tyranny, and naming your patch of Michigan after it was a way of taking a side. So Kalamazoo County ended up with both an Alamo and a Texas, born together out of one burst of frontier enthusiasm.

It says something about how the 1830s frontier worked. People streaming west from New York and New England carried the newspapers and the slogans of the day with them, and when it came time to christen a brand-new township, current events were as good a source as a founder’s surname. A battle in San Antonio became, by way of settler sympathy, a quiet rural township of farms and woodlots in southwest Michigan.

Drive Alamo’s back roads today and there’s nothing Texan about it — just rolling farm country and a couple of lakes. The only trace of the Alamo here is the word on the township hall and the green road signs, a small monument to how far the news of 1836 traveled.