Kalamazoo: Nineteenth-century Homes in a Midwestern Village

Peter J. Schmitt, 1976

Read  Nineteenth-century Homes in a Midwestern Village

Keeping a current inventory of historic buildings and sites was an early charge of the Kalamazoo Historic Preservation Commission. To do this, it brought in Western Michigan University professor and architectural historian Dr. Peter Schmitt to help. In 1971, Schmitt submitted a list of forty-eight buildings and one site to the Commission, having collected over 400 pages of research from newspapers, city directories, maps and tax information. That information formed the nucleus of Dr. Schmitt’s first book, Nineteenth-century Homes in a Midwestern Village.

Funding came from the Preservation Commission, two local foundations and private donations, and the book was a Bicentennial project for Kalamazoo County. The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts hosted an exhibit of the book’s photographs from July through September of 1976.

Nineteenth-century Homes…  includes houses built between 1846 and 1915, is organized by architectural style, and came out two months after the photo exhibition. It was reprinted in 1978. Leading Detroit-based architectural photographer Balthazar Korab took the photographs. Kalamazoo architect, writer and photographer Norman Carver, Jr. designed the book, and Tim Kendall from Western Michigan University did several drawings.