Broadway Street

In early Lowell, Broadway was a busy street where the town’s first school, a log cabin built in 1838 near the north edge of the current parking lot, served as the only school between Ionia and Grand Rapids. Its room had long benches made of split logs and boards for desks along the sides, and Miss Caroline Baird taught 14 pupils there, nine white and five Odawa children, during the first three-month summer term while living in a loft above the classroom. The school was abandoned in 1845 and torn down in 1856. Businesses later lined North Broadway Street. On the east side, G. W. Rouse built a two-story blacksmith shop in 1873, and in that building Lindsey Thomas invented a bean planter while Carney Parks invented the first sprayer, an invention that led to the Lowell Manufacturing Company, now Root-Lowell; Parks also invented and built the potato sprayer there in 1897 while renting the upper level from Rouse, whose smithy occupied the ground floor. North of that stood McQueen's Stand In barn, where horses could be fed and cared for while their owners were in town; built by Doc McQueen in 1906 with room for thirty horses and rigs, it later became the People's Garage for automobiles. On the west side of the street stood the Perrin and Perrin Livery barn, built in 1871. Dr. E. D. McQueen bought it from his father-in-law in 1893, treated horses and cattle and maintained a hospital for lame and diseased horses, and became known statewide for the fine horses he raised and sold. The barn was razed in 1933, and the McQueens then donated the land for a new United States Post Office, which opened on the site in 1940. Lowell Light and Power began after the people of Lowell decided in 1894 to develop a municipally owned utility, established in 1895, with a power dam built on the Flat River about 9 miles north of Lowell and poles and wires strung to town. The building at 127 North Broadway was built in 1924, with additions in 1940 and 1946.

Lowell, Michigan · United States