Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Schoolcraft, MI

Schoolcraft is a village in Schoolcraft Township, Kalamazoo County, about 13 miles south of Kalamazoo on US 131.

Recorded on October 5, 1831, Schoolcraft was the first town platted in Kalamazoo County; it was laid out by surveyor Lucius Lyon, who later became a U.S. senator and Michigan's first U.S. representative.

Lyon named the village for his friend Henry Schoolcraft, the geographer, geologist and ethnologist who had been a key member of the 1820 Cass Expedition through the Michigan Territory.

Settlement of the surrounding prairie began in 1828 when Bazel Harrison moved his family from Ohio and became the first Euro-American settler in what became Kalamazoo County.

Schoolcraft was incorporated as a General Law Village on January 4, 1866, and was reincorporated in 1869.

The 2020 census counted 1,466 residents in the village; at the 2010 census Schoolcraft had 616 households.

The Schoolcraft home of Dr. Nathan Thomas, Kalamazoo County's first doctor and a leading abolitionist, served as a station on the Underground Railroad — between 1840 and 1860 he and his wife Pamela are estimated to have sheltered between 1,000 and 1,500 fugitive slaves on their way to Canada, and the house is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Just west of the village, the roughly 23-acre Cooper's Island woods is a surviving remnant of the Big Island of Prairie Ronde and was the setting for James Fenimore Cooper's 1848 frontier novel The Oak Openings.

Schoolcraft has held its annual Fourth of July celebration nearly every year since 1925.

The Schoolcraft Ladies Library, built in 1896, grew out of a Ladies Library Association founded in 1879 to give local women educational opportunities decades before any state college existed in the area.