Thomas Cooley

Born [date unknown] in Massachusetts

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Biography

Compendium of history and biography of Kalamazoo County, Mich.

"Edwin J. Cooley

"This well known and esteemed farmer of Portage township was one of the early products of cultivated life in that now highly favored region, he having been born their on June 22, 1834, not more than two or three years after the first habitation was erected on its soil.

"He is the son of Thomas and Augusta (Stratton) Cooley, the father a native of Massachusetts and the mother of the state of New York. He was a farmer in New York, and in 1831 traveled by water to Detroit and from there with teams to this county. In partnership with his brother Aaron he entered a tract of 320 acres of government land on Dry Prairie. He lived there until 1836, then build a flour mill on Little Portage creek on the edge of Kalamazoo township, which was the first of its kind in the county. There have been a corn mill there, built by a Mr. Barber. He operated this mill until 1850, when he sold it to Mssrs. Stone & Ransom, and bought a farm in Portage township on which he lived until 1869, then move to Porter township, Van Buren county, Where he lived 10 years. At the end of that period, he returned to this county and Portage township, where he died in 1880. The mother died in 1840, and he married Miss Caroline Newton for his second wife. She died in 1878. Politically he was a Whig in his early life and later a Republican for a number of years, then became a Democrat, but he never consented to take a political office. He had two sons and four daughters, all living but two of the daughters.^[1]

Sources

Footnotes

1. ↑ Compendium of history and biography of Kalamazoo County, Mich., by David Fisher and Frank Little, editors.,mChicago [Ill.]: A.W. Bowen & Co., [1906], page 388, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/arh7742.0001.001