Celery Flats: when Portage fed America its celery

Before Portage was a city of subdivisions and office parks, it was mud — glorious, black, money-making muck. In the late 1800s, Dutch immigrant farmers discovered that the drained wetlands along Portage Creek grew the best celery in America, and the Kalamazoo area became the nation’s “Celery City,” shipping trainloads of the crunchy stuff to every corner of the country. Pale Michigan celery was such a delicacy that vendors hawked it to railroad passengers like candy.

Portage preserves that improbable chapter at Celery Flats, a historical area along the creek where an interpretive center tells the muck-farming story beside a gathered village of local landmarks — an 1856 one-room schoolhouse, a 1931 grain elevator, a hay barn turned event space. Around it spreads the kind of park system Portage quietly does better than almost any Michigan city its size: the paved Bicentennial Trail follows the creek past the Flats, connecting lakes, woods, and downtown. The celery’s mostly gone; the flats are better company than ever.