Lovett Eames (1810-1863)

Pioneer Manufacturer and Inventor

Kalamazoo has a rich history of manufacturing. But long before the stoves, sleds, guitars, and other products that made our city famous came to be, the mills and workshops operated by Lovett Eames helped lay the groundwork for the village of Kalamazoo to become a manufacturing center.

Lovett Eames (1810-1863) and his brother Aaron Eames (1807-1873) were among the first to arrive in the Kalamazoo area during the land rush of the 1830s. Born 22 September 1810 in Rutland Township, New York, Lovett Eames was said to have been an expert in hydraulics. He owned a sawmill and machine shop in Belleville, New York, and worked as a teacher for a time at the Belleville Academy. His older brother Aaron was a successful fruit grower and blacksmith. Their grandfather, Captain Daniel Eames (1740-1812), was a veteran of the American Revolution.

The Eames brothers moved to Michigan in 1833. After a year in Jackson County, they settled on the “Grand Prairie” near Kalamazoo, where Lovett purchased a 40-acre parcel of land in November 1834 in section 12 of Oshtemo Township, which he then split with his brother. Their property was just north of Benjamin Drake’s farm along the west side of the Oshtemo-Kalamazoo township border (today’s Drake Road). Aaron Eames became a prosperous farmer and remained in Oshtemo Township for a number of years. It’s said that he established the township’s first fruit orchard there.

Lovett Eames and Lucy Celia Morgan (1811-1900) met in 1834 while Lucy was visiting her brother in Ann Arbor. In June 1835, they were married in Adams, New York, just south of Watertown near Lake Ontario. After their marriage, they settled on Lovett’s property in Oshtemo and remained there for about four years.

Ravine Road Sawmills

In September 1835, Lovett Eames purchased an acre-and-a-half of land in section 8 of Kalamazoo Township from farmer Daniel Wilmouth, which included a good-sized stream that ran beside Ravine Road (Fischer and Little described it as “the River road”). Lovett then built a dam across the creek and developed a water-powered sawmill, which he operated for some time as he continued to buy and sell property. The mill stood where Ravine Road now crosses the city limits, near the KPS Transportation Services facility. “The millpond was fed by a little stream that flowed through the ravine, and the water flowed over a 30-foot overshot wheel that drove the machinery in the mill” (Gazette). Virgin forests to the north and west of the village were rich with walnut, ash, oak, elm, and maple, which made milling timber a lucrative trade.

With help from their father, Daniel Eames, Jr. (1767-1855), the boys bought hundreds of acres of property in Oshtemo, Cooper, and Kalamazoo townships during the 1830s, most likely for the timber. Eager to take advantage of the lumbering trade, Lovett purchased a 40-acre plot of land in section 6 of Kalamazoo Township, some two miles up the road from his sawmill. Eames then put up a second sawmill, most likely powered by steam, near the intersection of Ravine Road and today’s Squires Drive. Both mills remained in operation under various owners until the 1870s. By then, deforestation had brought an end to their usefulness, and the sawmills were closed and eventually torn down to make way for the Kalamazoo & South Haven Railroad line.

“Many of the older houses now standing in the city contain timbers squared in this mill, the saw in which was kept busy until late into the 70s.”

—Kalamazoo Gazette, 10 June 1923

Eames Mill on Arcadia Creek

While visiting relatives in New York in September 1839, Lovett and Lucy Eames received word that their home in Oshtemo Township had burned. Rather than rebuild on the existing property in Oshtemo while a disagreement with the neighboring Drake family ensued, the couple made plans to move their family into the village of Kalamazoo. By the time the census taker came around in 1840, Lovett and Lucy Eames and their young son were evidently boarding in the village and would soon after be expecting their second child.

By the summer of 1841, Eames had set up a sawmill and workshop on the west side of the village where he was manufacturing “Minor’s [sic] improved pumps for wells and cisterns” (Gazette). The mill stood where the Road to Genesee Prairie (now Oakland Drive) met the old Territorial Road to Paw Paw (Michigan Avenue) next to Arcadia Creek. “The place was then far out in the country from the village,” his daughter Ellen recalled. It was powered by a “wonderful old water wheel that was turned by the race nearby” (Gazette). Soon after, Eames built a house for his growing family on the property near the mill.

“Minor’s Improved Pumps”

Eames’s pumps were based on a design patented in 1835 by Amos Miner. The chambers were made of hard maple or hickory, boiled in tallow or linseed oil to make them “free from objection usually urged against pumps, as injuriously affecting the water” (Gazette), and then boxed in cast iron with leather valves, which Eames claimed was his improvement over Miner’s patented design. The pumps sold for $10 each (roughly $350 in today’s dollars) and were warranted against defects for six months, although Eames cautioned that he was not responsible for damage caused from drawing sand. His ads clearly stated, “they are not warranted to operate in earth, but water” (Gazette).

“Father was a man apt to procrastinate… Orders would come in and my mother would worry when she saw there were not enough pumps made to fill them. She would say: ‘Mr. Eames,’ (She always addressed him with that dignified title), ‘ don’t you think you should get those pumps ready?’ ‘I am going to read my paper if the Devil comes,’ my father would answer.”

—Ellen (Eames) DeGraff, Kalamazoo Gazette, 19 August 1928

“Pipe for Aqueduct”

Along with his pumps, Eames also manufactured wooden “pipe for aqueduct” (Gazette). Before metal came into general use, pipes made from wood were considered the norm for carrying potable water. Logs of varying sizes would typically be cut into 6-foot sections, then using a lathe he devised, Eames would bore a 1¾-inch diameter hole through the length of each log. The logs would then be boiled in pitch as a preservative and the ends threaded or otherwise treated so they could be joined. Pipes from warehouse stock sold for $1.25 per rod (roughly 16 feet), but other sizes could be made to order. Wooden pipes manufactured by Eames were used to build the first water systems in the village and “in places far removed from Kalamazoo” (Gazette). Counterintuitive as it might seem, the pipes held up rather well. Portions of Kalamazoo’s old wooden water mains have been recovered from beneath the city streets as recently as 2004.

Lucy Celia (Morgan) Eames

A native of Watertown, New York, and the daughter of a Baptist minister, Lucy Morgan traveled to Michigan in 1834 to visit her brother, Elijah W. Morgan, a prominent Ann Arbor lawyer and real estate developer. Morgan was one of the donors who helped establish the campus for the University of Michigan. Lucy was a highly educated woman “of strong personality and beloved by all who knew her” (Gazette). She taught for a time at the academy in nearby Lowville, New York, but had decided to stay with her brother for a year in Ann Arbor while she taught school there. It was during this time that she met and later married Lovett Eames.

“Select School”

Soon after the birth of her second child, Lucy Eames opened a “select” (i.e., private) school for young women in April 1842, where she taught “different branches of English education” (Gazette) for at least a year. Her classes were held in the rooms above Dr. Horace Starkweather’s drug store on Main Street in Kalamazoo, which stood where the Burdick Hotel was later built. One of her former students described her as “a lady to know and be in her company was to love, and esteem, admirable as a woman, a perfect scholar, no smattering of superficial knowledge, but a well grounded understanding of books herself, she studied deeply while she taught; we all loved her” (Gazette).

“Her mind was keenly alive to the benefits of literary organizations and the means of supplying them with information and stimulus to study, and in company with Mrs. Webster, Mrs. Stone, and other ladies of breadth of view and enterprise, organized the Ladies Library Association, of which she was a valued official for a long time.”

—Kalamazoo Gazette, 15 June 1900

Eames partnered with several different people during the 1840s in different types of manufacturing. The pump factory operated as Eames & Fitch for a time, while Eames shared ownership of the Ravine Road sawmill with Daniel Wilmouth (from whom he had purchased property) and James Faber. In 1846, Eames divested his interest in the lower Ravine Road mill and went into business with David A. McNair manufacturing linseed oil at the Kalamazoo Linseed Oil Mill. Around the same time, Eames formed a partnership with Nathan G. Hedges and opened a chair factory and wood turning facility, although that partnership lasted but a few weeks. By 1851, Eames had turned the Arcadia Creek mill over to J. M. Johnson, who was using it to manufacture wool into cloth.

91 South Street

In January 1851, Lovett secured a 6-acre lot from the State of Michigan near the west end of South Street, where he built a modest home for his family with a sitting room and parlor on the main level and three upstairs rooms. “We had a large orchard and garden,” recalled his daughter, Ellen, “and a wonderful barn with every possible mechanical device to save steps and labor” (Gazette).

“A collegiate department is now being organized in the Female Seminary, with a course of studies fully equal to that of any similar institution in the land. Ample grounds have been purchased of Mr. Lovett Eames for that purpose, in one of the most eligible locations ever selected for such a purpose. The beautiful grounds of the college on the eminence, west of the railroad, with the finely ornamented park on the east, where the buildings for the Female Seminary are to be erected, will altogether form one of the most beautiful landscapes to be found any where.”

—Kalamazoo Gazette, 1 June 1855

Lovett and Lucy Eames had a long-standing association with Kalamazoo College. He was a delegate for the Kalamazoo River Baptist Association’s eighth annual meeting in 1849 and served on the Kalamazoo Literary Institute board of trustees from 1851 through 1853. In response to the community’s desire to establish a separate “Female Department” at the college, Eames donated the west half of their South Street lot to the college, which allowed for the construction of Kalamazoo Hall (later known as Lower Hall). The cornerstone for Lower Hall was laid in August 1857 and the building was ready to be occupied by 1859. A marble tablet engraved with Lovett’s name hung in the south tower of the building.

Manufacturer and Inventor

Eames manufactured several types of products over the years: from pumps and water pipes to carriage and wagon wheel hubs, sawmill machinery, steam engines, and portable sawmills. But Lovett Eames was not only a skilled manufacturer, he was also a creative inventor. “He was a genius,” his daughter Ellen later recalled, “with no previous preparation in the line of special education. His inventions, every one, worked and he never failed to accomplish what he set out to do” (Gazette). During the 1850s, he formulated a device for local grain dealers called a “Grain Metre,” which was designed to “weigh and discharge every kind of grain with entire accuracy” (Gazette). He later received patent protection for at least four of his inventions that were used for manufacturing wagon wheels; a machine that prepared hub-blocks for the lathe (1857), two different mortising machines (1858 and 1860), and a drill bit/wood chisel device for boring square holes (1860).

In 1861, Lovett went to Watertown, New York, to install pumping equipment for the city’s newly instituted Watertown Water Works Company. While there, he and his brother, Moses Eames (1808-1892), bought Beebee Island on the Black River in the heart of Watertown and built a machine shop, where they began to manufacture tools and pump components.

Back in Kalamazoo, Lovett installed a hydraulic water system in the village (said to be the first such system in this part of the country), which provided running water for the National Driving Park and fairgrounds on Portage Street.

“It was Mr. Eames who first conceived the idea of establishing in Kalamazoo a municipal waterworks. He at one time volunteered to construct a pipeline from Oakwood, then known as Wood’s lake, to bring water to the village, and also offered to construct a water ram to bring water from Axtel creek into the village. Both these offers were refused by the village fathers… And from above the Michigan Central railroad lay a line of wooden pipes to the station to supply water for the locomotives. This water system was also one of Mr. Eames’ ideas, and was used for many years.”

—Kalamazoo Gazette, 10 June 1923

Soon after completing the Portage Street project, disaster struck in September 1863 when a boiler inside the foundry building exploded and Lovett was killed as he was leaving the building. He was buried in the Eames family lot at Mountain Home Cemetery.

After Lovett’s death, Lucy remained at the family estate on West South Street while continuing to raise and educate her children. Contrary to her outwardly stern nature, Lucy was said to be a “very charitable woman” (Gazette) and was an avid supporter of higher education, especially for women. She opened her home for a time as a boarding house for Kalamazoo College students in need. As an advocate for literacy, Lucy was a charter member of the Ladies Library Association in Kalamazoo and served on its board of directors for many years.

The Next Generation

Whether in Kalamazoo or elsewhere, the eight children of Lovett and Lucy Eames (six boys and two girls) carried on their parents’ inventive genius and socially conscious tenacity. All were born in Kalamazoo, all were educated in Kalamazoo’s Public Schools, at least one attended Lucinda Hinsdale Stone’s private school, and most were Kalamazoo College graduates.

Son Elisha Daniel Eames (1836–1903) attended Kalamazoo College and was a featured prize speaking candidate during the March 1846 commencement ceremony. He was a Civil War veteran, an ironworker, patent holder, engineer, and co-inventor of the Eames vacuum brake, which saw extensive use in the railroad industry.

Daughter Lucia Augusta (Eames) Blount  (1841–1925 ) was a Kalamazoo College graduate and an art instructor there. After her marriage in 1864 to Colonel Henry Fitch Blount (1829-1917), a wealthy manufacturer of plows and agricultural equipment, they traveled extensively with their children before settling in Evansville, Indiana, where Lucia became a local suffrage leader and a strong advocate for women’s rights. She formed literary clubs and was a charter member of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, for which she served as a state regent, vice president, and historian general. In 1891, the Blounts purchased the prestigious Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington, D.C., where they lived until Mr. Blount’s death in 1917.

Son Frederick W. Eames (1843–1883) attended Kalamazoo College and was a veteran of the Civil War. Frederick was co-inventor of the Eames vacuum brake and founded the Eames Vacuum Brake Company in Watertown, New York.

Son Wilfred “Will” Eames (1846–1903) attended Kalamazoo College and was a Civil War veteran. He was an inventor, a patent holder, and founder of the Wilfred Eames Manufacturing Company in Rochester, New York. He later managed the Economy Gas Stove Company in Kalamazoo.

Son Gardner T Eames (1851–1924) was an apprentice in the Kalamazoo Telegraph newspaper office, then became a machinist and manufacturer of wagon wheel hubs and spokes, wooden pulleys, and later drill grinders. He was inventor of the Atlas mandrel press, founder of the Eames Pulley Company, and co-founded a firm that later became the Atlas Press Co.

Son Charles Bridge Eames (1853–1906) attended Kalamazoo College. He was at first a partner with his brother, Gardner, in the Eames Pulley Company, and later became a credit manager for a firm in St. Louis.

Daughter Ellen D “Nellie” (Eames) DeGraff (1854-1933) attended Mrs. Stone’s private school until it burned in 1866, then spent her final year at the Union School on West Street (Westnedge). After high school, she married Christian DeGraff and moved to Evansville, Illinois, where her husband became a traveling salesman for Henry F. Blount’s agricultural equipment company. She later studied in Germany and became a musician, author, and artist.

A sixth son, Judson M. Eames (1848-1858) died of unknown causes at the age of ten.

Eames Vacuum Brake Co.

Some two decades after his death, the legacy of Lovett Eames was brought to life in a new and rather unique way. Founded with financial support from his father, Frederick Eames established the Eames Vacuum Brake Company, and set up a manufacturing facility in his father’s machine shop on Beebee Island in Watertown, New York. By 1872, the firm had become one of the nation’s chief manufacturers of brake components for the railroad industry.

“Fred Eames, the inventor of the Eames Vacuum brake has been to England to introduce the brake in that country. It has been received with much favor there. It is in use on both the Metropolitan and New York elevated railways, and gives the most perfect satisfaction, the trains being stopped instantly. These brakes are manufactured at Watertown, N. Y.”

—Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1878

Locomotive No. 5000: the “Lovett Eames”

Hoping to expand his company’s presence in the European market, Fred devised a rather clever marketing scheme. In 1881, Eames purchased the impressive Baldwin “5000,” the five-thousandth locomotive produced by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. The commemorative engine was built especially for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad but had been repossessed by the manufacturer and offered for sale at a substantial discount. Eames had it refinished and fitted with his company’s vacuum brake components, then named it the “Lovett Eames” in honor of his father. With his father’s portrait painted below the cab window and a stylized view of the Watertown manufacturing facility painted on the coal tender, Fred shipped the “Lovett Eames” to England where his braking systems could be properly demonstrated. Eames’s marketing ploy failed to impress the Brits, however, and the engine was scrapped in 1884. Nonetheless, the Eames company remained enormously successful. It was later reorganized and lives today as the New York Air Brake Corporation.

“The Play House”

After housing various firms that manufactured gas stoves and gas arc lamps, the old Eames Mill building sat vacant for a time until it was purchased in 1916 by Western Michigan University (WMU) president Dwight B. Waldo. During World War I, the building was used for manual arts classes and as a machine shop. During the 1920s, Western’s Department of Dramatic Arts began using the space as a practice and performance venue nicknamed “The Play House.” The building was eventually condemned due to safety concerns, and in 1942 it was demolished to make way for a new manual arts building. That building now houses WMU’s physical plant and transportation services. Members of the WMU community viewed the aging structure’s “passing with regret and a feeling that a real friend has gone” (Gazette).

The Eames Family Home

In August 1878, Lucy Eames sold her family home and lot at 91 South Street (later 775 West South Street) to her daughter, Lucia Blount, who had the home rebuilt “with all the modern improvements” (Gazette) for her family to use as a summer residence. Lucia and her husband, Henry Fitch Blount, were a family of considerable means. Consequently, their new summer “cottage” in Kalamazoo was significantly larger than the old Eames home, “twelve to fourteen rooms and an excellent attic… surrounded by one of the most beautiful lawns in this city” (Gazette). Their generous contributions helped support many organizations in the community, including the Academy of Music, the Ladies Library Association, the People’s Church, and others.

Lucy remained in the Blount home as a year-round resident during her final years. She traveled abroad and her daughter visited her often. After a lengthy illness, Lucy Celia (Morgan) Eames passed away in June 1900 at the age of 88. She was buried beside her husband in the Eames family lot at Mountain Home Cemetery.

After Lucy’s death, the South Street property was deeded to her son Gardner T. Eames and his wife in September 1905. Gardner retained ownership of the home until his death in 1924. It was later sold and razed to make way for additional housing. The twin properties at 837 and 839 West South Street currently occupy the lot where the Eames home once stood.

Written by Keith Howard, Kalamazoo Public Library staff, April 2024