The day kitty litter was invented in Cassopolis

In January 1947 a woman named Kay Draper walked into the Lowe family’s coal-and-clay yard in Cassopolis because her sandbox had frozen solid and her cat had started tracking ashes through the house. She wanted sand. Edward Lowe — just home from the Navy, working for his father — handed her a bag of granulated clay instead, a mineral the company sold to soak up grease spills in factories. A week later she was back for more. The clay didn’t track, it didn’t stink, and it soaked up everything. Lowe scrawled “Kitty Litter” on five-pound bags, talked a local pet-shop owner into stocking them, and an entire industry was born in a southwest Michigan town of a couple thousand people.

It was not an overnight fortune. Lowe spent years driving the country with his trunk full of bags, giving them away at cat shows because nobody believed people would pay for dirt when sand was nearly free. They came around. By the time he sold the clay business in 1990, the company was doing around 165 million dollars a year, and the stuff he’d named on a whim sat in millions of households. Lowe always insisted the secret wasn’t the clay — it was that he sold cleanliness, not litter.

He never forgot where it started. In 1985 he and his wife Darlene used the money to create the Edward Lowe Foundation, headquartered on a sprawling property south of Cassopolis called Big Rock Valley — thousands of acres of restored prairie, oak savanna, and lake that the foundation now runs as a retreat for entrepreneurs and a working conservation site. So the next time you scoop a litter box anywhere on earth, the through-line runs back to one frozen sandbox and one man in Cass County who said, here, try the clay.