By Staff
I'm sure many remember the old brick house on Glenwood Road, which to me was always called the Vance Drake place.
It is now the home of Kirk and Donna (Murphy) Proshwitz and family.
I've been in this beautiful home a few times and it is too bad that only some parts of it are like what it looked like in 1860 when it was built.
The house was built for Ransom Dopp and it was to be the home of my old friend Hal Palmer's great-great-grandmother, who was born in 1857 and was 3 years old when they moved into it.
It was supposed to have cost $11,000 - a lot of money in 1860.
But at this time Mr. Dopp was getting $3 a bushel for wheat because of the farming prosperity of the Civil War times.
I read somewhere that he sold 500 horses at one time during the war, probably to the Army.
He had at least six tenant houses for his married employees. And he had some 20 men working for him.
Mr. Dopp, back at this time, owned 1,400 acres, which was the largest farm in Cass County.
By the time he died in 1890 he had owned more than 3,000 acres over the years, but had only 1,505 left when he passed away. The value at the time was $42,104.50.
Mr. Dopp at one time was a stagecoach driver. He drove a stage between Niles and Kalamazoo, passing Dowagiac by way of what is now known as Prairie Ronde Street (I wonder if he stopped at the old Stage Hotel on the northwest corner of Front and Prairie Ronde).
I think this was the old McOmber house, later owned by the Haines family when I was a boy.
The stage route went out over Henderson Hill to Volinia, then to Paw Paw and on to Kalamazoo.
This route was known as the "Mission Road" route, so called after the Carey Mission at Niles.
Later on, Mr. Dopp specialized in horse culture and was a big wheat farmer.
At one time he had a large number of horses, 50 mares and a dappled gray stallion for which he paid $2,000. It's name was Protocol and was a ribbon winner when shown at fairs.
When the old house was built it had a large stone furnace which burned four-foot logs to heat it.
Each house chamber had a bathroom with running water which was supplied by a tank filled by the pump of a tall windmill and was carried by copper pipes built into the walls. It was said the bricks used to build the house came from Benton Harbor or Kalamazoo by ox team.
I'm sure there are a lot of other stories about some of Cass County's big old homes and also some of Dowagiac's if one would do the research.
There is also talk of Mr. Dopp's buried money that no one has ever been able to find.