Kalamazoo County's first sawmill spun up here in 1831

Before Kalamazoo County had a courthouse or much of anything else, it had a sawmill, and it stood at Comstock. Judge Caleb Eldred built it in 1831 — the first sawmill anywhere in the county — putting the fast water near the Kalamazoo River to work cutting the lumber a brand-new settlement runs on. A year later, in 1832, Eldred teamed up with Horace Comstock and Samuel Percival to raise the county’s first grist mill, so the same neighborhood that sawed the boards for everyone’s houses also ground the flour for their bread.

Horace Hawkins Comstock is the man the township is named for, and he was the type the early frontier produced in bulk: lawyer, businessman, and politician all at once. He platted a village here, ran the store, built mills, and served as the postmaster — basically the whole town in one ambitious person. For a stretch in the 1830s it looked like Comstock, not Kalamazoo, might become the dominant settlement on this part of the river. The township was formally organized in 1834, with William Earl as its first supervisor.

It didn’t win that race. Kalamazoo, a few miles west, pulled ahead and never looked back, and Comstock settled into the long role it still plays — a riverside township just outside the city, part bedroom community, part its own place.

The mills are long gone, but the river that turned their wheels still runs through, and Merrill Park sits right on its bank. Bring a kayak or a fishing rod and you’re floating past the exact stretch of moving water that, two hundred years ago, was the reason anyone bothered to stop here at all.