Jonesville: the county's first town, and its first county seat

Before there was a Hillsdale to be the county seat of Hillsdale County, there was Jonesville. In 1828 Benaiah Jones brought his family to the spot where the old Sauk Trail — the Indian road that became the Chicago Road and then US-12 — crossed the St. Joseph River, and that river crossing made the place. It was the first real settlement in what would become the county, and when the county organized in the 1830s, Jonesville naturally took the title of county seat.

It didn’t keep it for long, and the story of how it lost it is pure frontier Michigan. County seats came with courthouses, business, and prestige, so towns fought over them like terriers. Hillsdale, a few miles south and growing fast on its own hills, wanted the seat for itself. The squabble even briefly parked the honor in a third spot, Osseo, before the whole thing settled around 1843 with the prize going to Hillsdale, where it has stayed ever since.

Jonesville took the loss and just kept being handsome. It never had to build itself around a courthouse, so it grew instead into a town of fine 19th-century homes and a brick main street that still runs along US-12. The 1874 Grosvenor House, an Italianate mansion designed by the architect of the State Capitol, anchors the street as a museum, and the older Munro House nearby once hid freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Oddly, the county’s oldest town is also one of its newest cities — Jonesville only traded village status for a city charter in 2014. So the place that was first to be settled, first to be the county seat, and first at a lot of things, waited almost two centuries to officially call itself a city at all.