Plank Roads in West Michigan

About the Event

Prepare yourself for a bone-shaking stagecoach ride down the “old plank road.” The year is 1855. We’ll board at the Eagle Tavern on Market Street, pay the $2.50 toll and wait for the driver to shout, “All aboard for Shingle Corners, Wayland, Bradley, Martin, the Junction and Kal-amazoo!

Marty, your guide, will show both historic and present-day photos of the road. She will explain what led to a “plank road craze” in Michigan and why the Kalamazoo road was such a boon to the little villages along it’s 48 mile route. Travelers will learn the evolution of Michigan road building, plank road “etiquette,” how a brisk gypsum trade contributed to its demise and why elephants used the road. At several points along our pictorial tour, we will leave “Old 131” or South Division Avenue to follow the older route of the wooden highway. We’ll pass plank road era farms, country churches and pioneer cemeteries and pause to admire a plank road toll house, a farmhouse built from pilfered road planks, stagecoach rest stops and the oldest brick house in West Michigan. Finally, our horses will begin their long descent down the forgotten “Goodrich Hill” into Kalamazoo. 

Marty grew up hearing her grandmother’s stories of stage horses galloping past her grandparents’ farm just north of Kalamazoo. Another ancestor, “Farmer Poet” Asa Harding Stoddard, published a satirical poem about the “perils of the plank.” After moving to Grand Rapids in 1980, Marty wanted to know more. She spent an entire year traveling up and down the road talking to residents and local historians to “get the story.” In 1982 she published her first feature article in the Grand Rapid’s Press Wonderland Magazine called “Next Stop, Grand Rapids! On the Old Plank Road.” She later adapted it for the Kalamazoo Gazette. For several years she led bus tours down the historic road. In 2019 she presented a slide show to the Grand Rapids Historical Society.

Marty Arnold was a member of the Grand Rapids Historical Commission and served a term as president. Before retiring she was a freelance journalist, a writing instructor at Aquinas College, a reporter at the Grand Rapids Press and an administrator for several non-profits in Grand Rapids. After retiring, Marty expanded her interest in history to include its indigenous or native plants. She is a Master Naturalist, a citizen scientist for the Michigan Butterfly Network and a member of the Grand Rapids Chapter of Wild Ones. She has published two novels set in West Michigan that delve into the unique natural history of West Michigan. When she’s not writing she is slowly restoring her yard to the way it was during the plank road era.