Lawton: the grape town Prohibition couldn't break

In late summer the air around Lawton turns sweet and faintly purple, because the country south and west of the village is stitched together by Concord vineyards. The grapes were here first, planted in the back half of the 1800s when growers worked out that Lawton’s sandy ridges and the lake’s softened weather suited the thick-skinned Concord almost perfectly.

Then 1919 handed the place a strange piece of luck. That year the country went dry, and across Michigan towns built on whiskey, beer, and wine watched their livelihoods evaporate. Lawton’s grape farmers should have been ruined too. Instead, the same year, Welch’s opened a grape juice plant in town — and a juice grape suddenly had nothing to fear from a law against alcohol. Dr. Thomas Welch had figured out how to pasteurize Concord juice back in 1869 so it would never ferment, first selling it for church communion. Half a century later, that idea kept Lawton in business while its neighbors went looking for new work.

The cooperative model is the part people forget. Welch’s is owned by the growers themselves, so the farmer hauling a wagon of Concords to the plant isn’t just a supplier — he’s part owner of the company buying them. Grapes from the fields around Lawton, Mattawan, and Paw Paw still roll into that plant every harvest and come out as juice and jelly shipped under a label most American kids grow up with.

The plant has only gotten bigger. Welch’s has poured money into expanding the Lawton operation in recent years, which is a quietly remarkable thing for a factory that opened before your great-grandparents were born. Drive past in October and the smell reaches you first: the whole village steeped in cooked grape, a hundred-plus harvests deep and counting.