Albion was a foundry town at the forks

Albion sits where the north and south branches of the Kalamazoo River come together, and locals have called that spot “the Forks” since the town began. Paul and Eleanor Peabody built the first cabin there in the spring of 1833, near the water. The river gave the town its nickname; iron gave it its century.

The Albion Malleable Iron Company opened in 1888 and ran, locally owned, until 1967 — and for most of that stretch it was simply what Albion did. Malleable iron is the stubborn kind, cast and then heat-treated so it bends a little instead of shattering, and the foundry turned it into farm-implement parts and, later, castings for the auto industry. Hundreds of people worked the foundries; the molten-metal economy pulled in workers from across the South and from Europe, and the town’s mix of churches and neighborhoods grew out of that pull. When you read that Albion is unusually diverse for a small Michigan city, the foundry is most of the reason.

The plants are mostly gone now, the last shuttered in the early 2000s, but the town didn’t forget how it got here. Every September since 1967, Albion has thrown the Festival of the Forks — part heritage fair, part hometown reunion — built explicitly around the river junction and the many origins of the people the iron drew in. It’s a town that names its biggest party after its geography, which tells you something. The Kalamazoo still forks quietly downtown, indifferent to all of it, the way rivers are.