Recovering the past of Furniture City More than two centuries of overlooked history flow through Grand Rapids like the river for which it is named. The first city surveyor dabbled in seances while platting out neighborhoods and streets. When a river dredging project left a mountain of stone tormenting residents, the ordeal pitted them against city leaders. Humane society agents uncovered horrendous conditions at the city pound and successfully brought about reform and much better conditions for the animals. Grand Rapids native and city archivist Matthew A. Ellis delves into the layout of streets, the manufacture of materials used to build the city, local food trends, and more.

This book is a comprehensive history of Grand Rapids, Michigan, from its founding in 1826 to the turn of the 20th century. Dwight Goss explores the city's growth and development, its major industries, and the individuals who helped shape its history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.