City Hall Block

City Hall Block was important on Main Street from the town’s earliest days. Around 1840, local fur trader and early landowner Daniel Marsac built a log cabin tavern that served stagecoach passengers traveling through town. Timothy and Roxinda White bought the tavern in 1848, when the first township meeting was held there and the township was named Lowell. Arza King bought it in 1851, called it Lowell House, and enlarged it by building around the log tavern. After Lowell House burned in 1864, the first brick building in Lowell rose on its site in 1866 as the two-storefront Pullen Block, where William Pullen operated a men’s tailor shop from 1866 until his retirement in 1900, and where VFW Post 8303 met from 1946 to 2002. A livery stable stood on the western corner beside the Pullen building, opening from its second floor into the brick building next door; after the livery burned in 1909, City Hall was built there in 1910 to house fire apparatus, police, public officials, the library, and public meetings, with a tower used to hang linen fire hoses to dry. City Hall was dedicated and opened on June 2, 1910, and was envisioned as the village’s social center for entertainments, concerts, meetings, clubs, socials, games, and musicals on its second-floor stage and auditorium. A gap now used as a parking lot was once the site of a three-story building known as Music Hall or Masonic Hall, whose third floor housed the Masonic Lodge from 1900 to 1950; a corset factory and the Michigan Motor Garment Factory No. 3 also operated there briefly before the building was torn down in 1974. On the east end of the block were a blacksmith shop and cooper shop. At 317 E. Main, Dr. J.P. Draper erected a building in 1910 for a veterinary hospital connected with his livery and blacksmith shop, and in 1915 he added the building to the east for auto sales and service as the town shifted from horses to automobiles. That auto garage later became Gould’s Garage from 1925 to 1956, Lowell Engineering from 1959 to 1980, and Lowell Auto Body from 1985 to 2004. Other block businesses included a bakery built at 309 E. Main in 1905, later Charlie Cook Plumbing from 1925 to 1945 and Dave Clark Sr. and Jr. Plumbing and Heating from 1945 to 1987, and the building at 311 E. Main, built about 1920, which housed the Little Racine Restaurant operated by Louis “Root” Racine, his wife Ellsie, and daughter Alice Lou about 1927, then a dentist office for Dr. Oatley and later doctors’ offices for Dr. Myers, Dr. McKay, and Dr. Gerard from 1953 to 1969.

Lowell, Michigan · United States