Ira Bird

Ira Bird arrived in Kalamazoo on the territorial road. He came to buy land.

Bronson, platted in 1831, became a land-office town in 1834, and for the next 25 years, these clerks facilitated the influx of settlers from the Atlantic coast, the wider Midwest, and from Ireland, Holland, and other European countries. The land office offered 2,700,000 acres for sale to white settlers in the shape of an inverted "L" formed by Kalamazoo and Calhoun counties and then Branch County to Lake Michigan. 

Business boomed for the first two years until a financial crisis, spurred on by Jacksonian politics and speculation, hit the nation. Before August 1836, buyers could purchase land using paper money; afterwards, buyers had to pay in gold or silver. Land speculation, reckless lending, and Andrew Jackson's monetary policy contributed to an economic depression that hit just as he left office. Land sales slowed to a crawl. Land sales amounted only 20% in 1837 what they had been one year earlier. Town officials changed the name of their town from Bronson to Kalamazoo on the eve of this panic.

Ira Bird lived in Washtenaw County, Michigan, when he arrived at the land office in September 1838 to purchase land in  section 24 of Township 2S, Range 11W. Today this is known as Lakewood in Kalamazoo Township. The land office started selling aliquots from that 640-acre section in 1835 beginning with Martin Lathorp. The next year, Horace Comstock purchased a full quarter section made up of the Kalamazoo River and its adjacent land. Horace Hudson purchased a relatively small lot, only 40 acres, the same year. After a year without any sales in that section, the year of the panic of 1837, Bird was one of three men to purchase land there on the same day. David Hale purchased land on the north side of the Kalamazoo River. James Walker and Ira Bird's land backed up to the lowlands of Horace Comstock. The US government clerks had not yet caught up to the town's name change and still referred to their office as Bronson.  They started writing the name, "Kalamazoo," when they sold off the final 80 acres the following year. 

Few things remained unchanged in the fast times of the Market Revolution and westward expansion. The same was true of Section 24 of Kalamazoo Township. A railroad came to parallel the territorial road on the north side of the river. At some point, a sawmill arrived on the land purchased by Bird. And if Bird joined in the settling of Kalamazoo, he also witnessed—and participated in—the unsettling of the region as well. The Pottawatomie still hung on to parts of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish when he arrived, but pressure for removal increased throughout the decade. 

Alongside the forced dislocation of land, settlers rarely stayed put themselves. Some settlers lost their land in financial ruin. Others moved on to different lands or died before setting down roots. Administrators sold off Ira Bird's land to Luke Olmstead in 1843 to pay off his debts just five years later. Two years after the closure of the land office, none of the original purchasers held title to the land.

Note on Sources: Context for the settlement of Bronson and Kalamazoo comes from Willis Dunbar, Kalamazoo and How it Grew (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1959). Land records come from U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, "General Land Office Records," https://glorecords.blm.gov/search/default.aspx#.