Dowagiac: fishing lures, stoves, and a first in 1854

For a small city, Dowagiac has left an outsized mark. It’s widely credited as the birthplace of the modern artificial fishing lure: in the late 1890s, local beekeeper James Heddon was whittling a piece of wood by the Dowagiac mill pond, tossed the scrap in the water, and watched a bass strike it. He started carving lures, and the company he founded in 1902 — Heddon — grew into one of the largest fishing-tackle makers in the world by the 1920s. Ask almost any angler and they’ve fished a Heddon.

Dowagiac was also a furnace town. The Round Oak Stove Company, started here in 1871 by Philo D. Beckwith, made what many considered the best heating stove money could buy; at its peak it employed well over a thousand people — a big share of the city — and Dowagiac billed itself as the “Furnace City of America.” The stoves were so popular that imitators sprang up nationwide, and “Round Oak” is a prized collectible today.

There’s one more first: in 1854, Dowagiac received the very first “orphan train.” These trains carried orphaned and homeless children out of crowded East Coast cities to new families in the Midwest and West — a movement that ran for 75 years, and it began right here.

The Heddon Museum tells the lure story, and the Dowagiac Area History Museum covers the rest.