For a young person growing up in Michigan, the days are probably filled with going to school, spending time with friends, maybe playing on a soccer team, and doing a few chores in exchange for a weekly allowance. It is not uncommon for families to move to different towns or to new houses in the same town, as families grow and prosper. It’s great to be a kid most of the time, isn’t it?

Now imagine daily life right around the time Michigan became the nation’s 26^th state, in 1837.  Most of Michigan was covered by vast forests.  In the wilderness, there were no paved roads or railroad tracks.  With only a few scattered cities established in the state, pioneers had to move along wagon trails, plank roads and stagecoach routes to travel through the state.  Fur trading was still the state’s largest industry, and travelers had to be on the look-out for wild animals, like bears and wolves.

Houses were lit with kerosene lamps, food was cooled in iceboxes, and rooms warmed by wood-burning or coal-burning stoves. Families did not have today’s luxuries of electricity, telephones or indoor plumbing.  Children worked every day on the farm, alongside their parents, feeding animals, planting, weeding and harvesting the crops, gathering eggs and milking cows – all by hand.

Since the land was covered by trees, fields had to be cleared and plowed before crops could be planted. Many thought the land could not be cultivated, but Michigan pioneer farmers proved them wrong.  Beneath the forested land, rich soils awaited cultivating.  The land was important, because farm families had to grow most of the food to feed their families.  Supplies and food they could not grow or make were purchased at trading posts or general stores located miles away from the farm over rough terrain.

When Robert Zeeb’s ancestors immigrated from New York and settled in Michigan in the late 1830s, land cost only about $1.25 an acre.  The family established a homestead in 1836 on about 160 acres of land located near the area known today as DeWitt Township in Clinton County.  After a year as homesteaders, the family purchased their farm and land from the U.S. government. They were one of thousands of families who settled in Michigan during that time, during a huge land rush referred to by historians as “Michigan Fever.” 

Like most immigrants of the time, they probably traveled from the East Coast along the Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825, on flatboats pulled by horses that walked along the edge of the canal. Barges traveled around two miles an hour and cost the passengers about a penny every two miles. When the barges reached the end of the canal at Buffalo, New York, passengers boarded steamboats for a three-day journey to Detroit. From there, they headed inland to settle the Michigan wilderness.  These brave pioneers were Michigan’s first farm families.