John Franklin Eesley

John Franklin Eesley was the eldest child of Albert Robert Eesley and Jennie Goldie, born 11 December 1859 in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the generation that carried the family’s milling trade across the border from Canada into Michigan, and the man whose surname still stands on a building in Plainwell.

He was schooled in the village schools of Plottsville, Ontario, then in New York City where the family lived for a time, and finally in Birmingham, Oakland County, Michigan after his parents moved south. His father was milling at Birmingham, and John learned the trade of a miller under his father’s instruction.

The journeyman years, 1881–1887

He worked the trade across five states before he owned anything:

Spring 1881 — came to Plainwell and took work with the Merrill Milling Company, staying about eighteen months.
Then Lockport, Illinois, about twelve months.
Then south to Eufaula, Alabama; then Huntington, Indiana; then Coshocton and Frazeysburg, Ohio.
1887 — returned to Plainwell for good, “determined to make that city his permanent abiding place,” with enough saved to buy into a mill.

1887 was a return, not a first arrival: he had worked in the town as a hired miller six years earlier, left to learn the trade across the country, and came back to establish himself in it.

The Goldie millwrights

A contemporary sketch says of his mother’s family that “for two hundred years or more the male portion of the Goldie family have been millwrights.” Jennie Goldie was born in Ayr, Scotland, and came to America in 1844. A millwright builds and maintains the mill; a miller runs it — so the trade may have come into the family through her people as much as through his father’s.

The Sunshine Flour Mill

Back in Plainwell from 1887 he operated the nearby D. B. Merrill flour mill. Then in 1891 he partnered with three other local men to establish the Sunshine Flour Mill in the 1869 building on West Bridge Street that had been put up as a roller rink.

Selling under the Sunshine Brand Flour label, it was the only steam mill in Plainwell, “equipped with all the modern appliances,” producing flour, feed and buckwheat flour for the town and its neighbors. At its height it turned out 600 barrels of buckwheat flour a day — described in most accounts as the second-largest producer of buckwheat flour in the United States, and in some, including the present occupant’s own telling, as the largest.

Why he moved the mill: he bought the town a park

In 1903–04 he cut the timber-frame mill building in two, moved it to the 700 block of East Bridge Street, and merged it with a grain elevator into a single mill-and-elevator landmark. The reason was not commercial pressure:

“J.F. Eesley traded his property with Ingraham and Travis, whose property was located in the flat iron, so that Mr. Eesley could give the flat iron property to the village for a park.”

Ingraham and Travis held the triangular downtown parcel Plainwell called the Flat Iron. Eesley wanted it for the town, so he traded them his own mill site to get it — which is why he then had to move his mill across town — and gave the Flat Iron to the village. Dedicated at Plainwell’s first homecoming in 1907, it is Hicks Park, the oldest park in the city, named for Joseph Hicks, the first village president, rather than for the miller who acquired the ground and gave it away.

The mill still stands at 717 E. Bridge because its owner preferred a park downtown to a convenient address. The Register nomination for the building places the original mill site precisely: West Bridge Street, across from what is now Hicks Park — the two parcels faced each other across the street.

A 1911 photograph captioned “Eesley Milling Co. Mill” may show a second Eesley building — reported destroyed by fire in 1932 — or may simply be the moved mill at its new site; the question is open.

Marriage and children

He married Kittie Belle Scott in Plainwell on 8 September 1885. Kittie had been born across the township line in Gun Plain Township, Allegan County, a daughter of Henry R. and Eliza Scott, both natives of New York State.

They had three children, of whom one reached adulthood:

Iva Belle Eesley (1887–1888) — died in infancy, the year after her father bought the mill; her middle name is her mother’s.
Harold John Eesley (1893–1977) — the only child to reach adulthood; outlived his father by nearly fifty years.
Franklin R. B. Eesley (1898–1908) — died at about ten, carrying his father’s middle name.

Later life

He voted the Prohibition ticket, belonged to the Knights of the Maccabees, and was a member of the Baptist society.

He ran the mill until his death — 9 July 1929 in Kalamazoo, Michigan — and was buried in Plainwell two days later, in plot P8/7 at Hillside Cemetery. The mill outlasted him by a century: the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 and now operates as The Old Mill Brewpub. He is the wealthiest member of the documented family — see Notable Family Members.

Portrait, late in life

John Franklin Eesley as an older man, c. 1920s — a studio portrait of the Plainwell miller in his sixties: grey hair swept back, clean-shaven, in a dark suit and tie.

John F. Eesley late in life, c. 1920s — the miller in his sixties, a generation on from the 1899 family-portrait crop at the head of this page, and a few years before his death in 1929.

The Plainwell grave

The granite grave marker of John F. Eesley at Hillside Cemetery, Plainwell, Michigan, carved “FATHER / JOHN F. EESLEY.”

His grave marker at Hillside Cemetery, Plainwell (plot P8/7), carved FATHER · JOHN F. EESLEY. The final digit of the year is weathered and reads as either 1928 or 1929; the Find a Grave record and the Michigan death index give 9 July 1929. A companion “Mother” stone for Kittie Belle Scott (1864–1946) should stand in the same plot.

The Eesley family monument at Hillside Cemetery, Plainwell, Michigan — a granite base carved EESLEY within an oval cartouche, with individual footstones set around it.

The family monument at Hillside Cemetery — the surname alone, cut into an oval cartouche, with the individual markers set low around it.

A newspaper biographical sketch of John F. Eesley, businessman of Plainwell and proprietor of the Eesley Mills, printed in a Michigan county history.

The c. 1890s county-history sketch that supplies the journeyman years, the schooling, and the Goldie millwright line — see the full artifact entry.