Reading once ran the world's biggest buffalo tannery

For a few strange years, the warm buffalo robe tucked over a Michigan family’s lap on a winter sleigh ride might well have been tanned in Reading. It started small in 1877, when a man named Stillman Parker opened a little shop to turn buffalo hides into robes, which were the fashionable thing to own just then. Local money saw an opening, formed a stock company, threw up big buildings, and went at it hard.

It worked almost too well. The Reading operation grew into the largest buffalo tannery in the world, employing around two hundred hands and turning out many thousands of robes a year — all of it fed by hides shipped east from the western plains, where the great herds still seemed endless.

They weren’t. The same demand that filled Reading’s tannery was emptying the prairie, and the buffalo were hunted to near extinction within just a few years. When the herds collapsed, the supply of hides dried up, and the largest buffalo tannery on earth had nothing left to tan. The robe trade ended about as fast as it began, and Reading went back to being a quiet railroad town with a tannery-sized hole in its economy.

It’s an easy thing to miss now, driving through. Reading had been settled in 1840 as Basswood Corners and made its name as a shipping point on the Lake Shore line — grain, chairs, ordinary small-town industry. But for one short window it was wired straight into one of the great tragedies of the American West, a Hillsdale County village whose biggest factory ran entirely on the vanishing of the buffalo.