The first settler in Kalamazoo County put down roots on a round prairie

In 1828, before Kalamazoo County had a name or a single road, Bazel Harrison loaded up his family in Ohio and settled on a wide patch of open grassland the early French travelers had already named — Prairie Ronde, the round prairie. He was the first settler in what would become the county, and he picked the spot for the same reason the next wave would: the prairie was ready-made farmland. No forest to clear, just deep grass and good soil sitting in the sun, roughly circular, ringed by oak woods.

That open ground pulled people fast. Dr. Nathan Thomas, who would become the county’s first physician, arrived in Prairie Ronde Township in 1830. A year later, in 1831, the surveyor Lucius Lyon platted the nearby village of Schoolcraft, which became the first established town in the county — naming it for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the geologist and explorer who had crossed Michigan with Lewis Cass.

The prairie was striking enough to make it into American fiction. James Fenimore Cooper, of “Last of the Mohicans” fame, used these oak-dotted grasslands as the setting for his 1848 frontier novel “The Oak Openings,” and Bazel Harrison himself is said to turn up in its pages.

Prairie Ronde Township stays rural to this day, mostly farms working the same dark prairie loam that stopped Harrison in his tracks two centuries ago. The round shape that earned the place its French name is hard to read from a county road now, but stand in a flat field in late summer with corn running to the treeline and you can feel why a tired family from Ohio decided this was far enough.