The Whitney Tavern Stand served as an inn and local gathering place in Cascade Township, Michigan for fifty years after its construction in the 1852-53 period. In its first few years it served as a stop for stagecoaches on the lines that, connecting Battle Creek, Hastings, and Kalamazoo with Grand Rapids, passed through Whitneyville. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Significance
The Whitney Tavern Stand served as an inn and local gathering place in Cascade Township, Michigan for fifty years after its construction in the 1852-53 period. In its first few years it served as a stop for stagecoaches on the lines that, connecting Grand Rapids with Battle Creek, Hastings, and Kalamazoo. Following the completion of a more direct plank road between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids that siphoned off traffic, it continued to serve the stage line between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids via Hastings until around 1870. At that point stage service ended with the completion of the Grand River Valley Railroad line through Hastings to Grand Rapids. Despite alterations since its conversion to a private home in the early twentieth century, the hotel, with its side-gable form and eight-bay wide façade, retains much of the characteristic appearance of a southern Michigan stagecoach inn dating from the mid-nineteenth century.
Cascade Township was created from Ada Township, Michigan in 1848. Settlement began in 1836 but proceeded slowly for the first few years. Development beginning in 1838 of a state road between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids that passed through the township along what are now Whitneyville Avenue and Cascade Road served as a major impetus to settlement. The Battle Creek-Grand Rapids road was one of many routes in southern Michigan laid out and built at the direction of the legislature of the newly established state of Michigan in the late 1830s and early 1840s. It followed what seems today a not very direct route between the two places, passing through the early settlement of Gull Prairie – what is now Richland – well west and only a bit north of Battle Creek, before turning directly north through Prairieville, Middleville, Whitneyville, and Cascade to Grand Rapids.
By the early 1840s stages over this road were carrying passengers between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids. By the late 1840s Patterson & Ward (W. G. Patterson of Kalamazoo and John K. Ward of Battle Creek) provided stagecoach service. By late 1854 the Good Intent Line (C. W. Lewis, proprietor) was providing stagecoach service between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, at one end, and Grand Rapids, with the Battle Creek and Kalamazoo routes merging at Richland. Beginning in the 1840s, stagecoaches also operated from Battle Creek north to Hastings, west to Middleville, and on to Grand Rapids along the same route. All of this traffic passed through Whitneyville, and most or all of it presumably stopped at Whitney's tavern.
The Whitneys were among the early settlers in Cascade Township. The families of Zerah Whitney (1784-1873), a Connecticut native, and his sons Ezra (1815–99) and Peter arrived in the 1841-42 period and took up land at the site of what soon became known as Whitneyville. The hamlet acquired the township's first post office in 1849 and eventually contained a sawmill, grist mill, store, blacksmith shop, church, and a few scattered houses. But the significance of Whitneyville declined after 1888 when the Grand Rapids, Lansing and Detroit Railroad, the only railroad line built through the area, established its station a mile away at McCords.
Ezra Whitney built a small log hotel in 1842 on a site across the road and a short distance to the south from the present house. He replaced this original hotel with the present frame Whitney Tavern Stand – so identified in an 1870 history – in 1852 or 53. The new tavern and hostelry as built was an L-shaped building with a two-story portico across the front, a ballroom occupying the second story of the entire street-facing front section, and a large wing, containing the kitchen and presumably lodging quarters, extending to the rear from the hotel's north end. The hotel served travelers’ needs as a stagecoach stop and inn providing meals and overnight accommodations and also served as a local watering hole and, with its second-story ballroom, presumably social and cultural center as well. Information about specific events held in the Whitney's ballroom is lacking, but typically these country inn ballrooms hosted a broad range of functions, from dances and entertainments to religious services, church socials, and political meetings.