• While most villages in Michigan are shrinking, Vicksburg’s population has boomed since 2010
• Village leaders credit a concerted effort toward business revitalization and tourist attraction
• The village’s revitalization efforts continue

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This story is part of Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative’s coverage of equitable community development. SWMJC is a group of 12 regional organizations dedicated to strengthening local journalism. Visit swmichjournalism.com to learn more.

VICKSBURG — It was a sweltering evening, the kind of night where many Michiganders stay home and crank up the AC.

Not in Vicksburg, where hundreds thronged the downtown to mark the season’s first ‘Burg Days, a village tradition for the past several years. On Wednesday nights during the summer, village officials block off streets for a community party that includes live bands, food trucks and activities for kids.

And it’s not just locals in attendance. It also draws people like Diane Fayak and her daughter Shelby Matthews, both from Portage, who were there June 10 with Matthews’ two young children.

“We’re here for the music, here for the food, here for the bouncy house,” Fayak said. “We love it.”

Added Matthews: “It’s more than Portage has to offer” in terms of a fun downtown vibe.

More than half of Michigan’s villages have lost population since 2010, especially those outside of metro Detroit and Grand Rapids or in rural areas that lack shoreline along the Great Lakes.

Vicksburg is an interesting case — it’s thriving, even though it’s literally off the beaten path, 14 miles southeast of downtown Kalamazoo. 

“We’re the largest village in the state without an MDOT road going through it,” said Jim Mallery, Vicksburg village manager.

And yet:

• Since 2010, Vicksburg’s population has grown 37%, making it the fourth fastest-growing village in Michigan. Vicksburg now has nearly 4,000 residents, twice as many as Parchment or Galesburg — both of which are nearby cities, not villages.
• Downtown Vicksburg had 11 vacant storefronts when Mallery took over as village manager in 2016, he said. Today, the business district is fully occupied.
• Events such as ‘Burg Days are raising Vicksburg’s profile. Last summer, Mallery said the village tracked the ZIP codes of cellphones downtown during ‘Burg Days. By August, the weekly event was drawing about 4,000 people and 70% of the phones tracked were from ZIP codes outside of Vicksburg.

Hunter Finnila and his wife Lauren are among those who have recently moved to Vicksburg.

Hunter, 30, is a civil engineer who grew up in Battle Creek and became familiar with Vicksburg while on a job assignment several years ago. Meanwhile, Lauren, 28, a metro Detroit native, was living in Kalamazoo and working for a real estate title company where she noticed the uptick of Vicksburg home sales.

Lauren “saw this area was a good place to move to,” Hunter said. Soon after the couple married in 2020, they bought a home in a new plat developed by Allen Edwin Homes.

They have no regrets. In the five years they’ve lived in Vicksburg, the community has only gotten better, they said.

The downtown “has changed drastically,” Lauren Finnila said, between the influx of new businesses, downtown events and a sprucing up of the downtown’s physical appearance.

The couple loves Jasper’s, a downtown pizza and sandwich shop, and are regular customers at Gilbert and Ivy, a bookstore that opened four years ago. Lauren recently joined a Vicksburg walking club sponsored by downtown businesses.

“They really have made a big effort to have community events,” Lauren said, citing an April literary festival sponsored by the bookstore.

“That was so much fun,” she said. “And the ‘Burg Days are great.”

The mill

Vicksburg got its start in 1831 when John Vickers built Kalamazoo County’s first grist mill, creating Sunset Lake and a fledgling community then called Brady.

Within a decade, Brady had a general store, a blacksmith shop, a hotel and a school.

The growing community was incorporated as the village of Vicksburg in 1871. By then, it was a bustling town with both a north-south and an east-west rail line. It was those rail lines — and the area’s abundant supply of water — that led to construction of the Lee Paper Co., which opened in 1905, just southeast of downtown.

For decades, the mill was the village’s largest taxpayer and employer, with 250 workers at its peak. It ceased operations in 2001.

Kalamazoo County acquired the sprawling 400,000-square-foot building and its 120-acre campus through a tax foreclosure in 2013. The next year, Chris Moore — a Vicksburg native who made his fortune in the Seattle tech industry — announced his plans to buy the mill and turn it into a multi-use complex.

It took four years for Moore to line up the funding and nail down $30 million in tax credits, but the purchase went through in 2018, as Moore outlined his vision for an $80 million mixed-used development featuring a brewery, a museum and hotel, retail and event spaces and residential apartments.

Eight years later, the mill is still empty. But Moore, who lives in Nevada, has spent more than $40 million so far into restoring the mill, including new roofs, repairing the windows and brickwork and environmental remediation, according to Steve Sielatycki, vice president for The Mill Group, Moore’s parent company for his Vicksburg properties.

Moore also has bought a number of other properties in the village, including seven buildings downtown, all historic buildings that he has restored, and 35 homes near the mill.

Moore’s downtown holdings house Mackenzie’s Bakery; the Vicksburg Hardware Store; the Prairie Ronde Artist Gallery, the music and art residency programs that Moore founded, and offices for The Mill Group.

Moore also has buildings on Main Street that have been restored but are still vacant and where he stores his collection of brewery and bar memorabilia that Moore plans to turn into a museum. The Mill Group is still working on plans for those buildings, which will be “public facing” vs. private offices, Sielatycki said.

So far, Moore has spent about $10 million on renovating his downtown buildings, Sielatyck added.

As for the homes, most are rented out. Moore has told town leaders he intends to use them for worker housing as the mill project develops.

Moore’s vision could potentially transform Vicksburg, Mallery said. But the timetable remains uncertain.

And the village isn’t waiting on Moore.

“We don’t have to be this small village waiting for things to come,” Mallery said. “We can be proactive.”

Revitalization

With that in mind, Mallery has led the drive for downtown revitalization regardless of what’s happening with the mill project.

The goal: Create a warm, welcoming, highly walkable downtown, one that draws people to Vicksburg and generates a vibrant sense of community.

The first major step was taking advantage of a project to replace the village’s aging water and sewer lines — and using that as an opportunity to widen the downtown sidewalks from eight feet to 15 feet, Mallery said. It was “painful” during the months the streets were torn up, he said, but wider sidewalks allowed for installation of permanent outdoor tables and benches throughout downtown, a hit during outdoor festivals and events.

Other improvements include:

• Creation of a “social district” that allows people to have alcoholic drinks outside of bars and restaurants, a policy conducive to hosting outdoor events.
• Revitalizing Oswalt Park, a 14-acre downtown “mini-park” that now includes picnic tables, playground equipment and a fire pit.
• Encouraging downtown businesses to repaint their storefronts with an offer by the village to pay for the paint — which the village bought from the local hardware store.  “It took about six years, but almost every building is participating in that paint program, so the downtown has a fresh, new look,” Mallery said.
• Offering a mini-grant program for downtown businesses who want to otherwise improve their facades, such as adding an awning or installing a rollup door to create an open-air space in warm weather.
• Opening a kayak rental station operated by the village parks department at Sunset Lake Park.
• Developing a rich schedule of community events, the most ambitious of which is ‘Burg Days,  now in its fourth year. But there’s also a Harvest Festival in the fall, an IceBURG Festival in February and Christmas in the ‘Burg in December, not to mention the longtime Old Car Festival in June.

Another improvement underway: Repaving the municipal lot behind the buildings lining the southwest corner of Main and Prairie streets. The new lot will allow the commercial buildings bordering it to create a back public entrance. Or landlords could split its first-floor space in two, with a second storefront that opens into the parking lot, Mallery said.

“That will make all these buildings more valuable,” Mallery said. “It really gives us an opportunity” to create more downtown storefronts.

There’s even talk of a beer garden in that space.

“We’ve really focused on bringing people downtown,” Mallery said.

Local businesses are tracking customers’ ZIP codes, and they’ve seen transactions triple on Saturdays on ZIP codes outside of Vicksburg, Mallery said.

“It’s our educated hypothesis that those are people who come here on Wednesdays” for ‘Burg Days and then return on a Saturday to check out the stores.

Influx of entrepreneurs

For a small town that’s neither a tourist destination nor in a remote area where it’s the only commercial center around, downtown Vicksburg has a lively mix of shops and restaurants.

There’s Mackenzie’s Bakery, a bookstore, a ceramic studio that offers classes and a “play café” that’s a combination coffee shop and indoor playscape.

Many of those are relatively new businesses started by women entrepreneurs, such as Kimm Mayer, who opened the Gilbert and Ivy bookstore in 2022.

After stepping away from a corporate career, Mayer decided to open a bookstore and picked Vicksburg as the place to do it.

“When you look around, it’s got amazing charm and appeal and it’s easily walkable,” Mayer said. “It easy to facilitate different events here; it’s a town that likes to have a party and it’s a great party host in terms of bringing people in and making them feel welcome. There’s a vibrant arts community here, and there’s also retail and a bit of everything on a small scale, something for everyone.”

She also credits Mallery for fostering a favorable environment for entrepreneurs.

“Part of it is also the leadership, and the village being so intimately and actively involved in the promotion of the village,” she said.

“Mallery says, ‘We’ll get them here, but it’s your job to keep them coming back,’” Mayer said. “I think that’s an amazing philosophy that you don’t get in other communities, where they don’t even make the attempt to try and bring people in.”

Gail Reisterer, currently the longest serving member on the Vicksburg Village Council, also gives credit to Mallery, praising his vision and his ability to implement it, including a talent with getting grants.

“He’s amazing,” she said.

Reisterer said that when she first moved to Vicksburg in 1964, her initial impression was the downtown was “a dump.”

While Reisterer came to love the community, she said, for most of her years, it seemed a village whose glory days were behind it. In fact, when Mallery was hired in 2016, village finances were so bad there were fears Vicksburg would be taken over by the state, she said.

That’s made the recent turnaround even more remarkable, Reisterer said.

“It’s now a destination,” she said. “We’re getting people coming here from Mattawan, from Portage, from Kalamazoo and Three Rivers.”

Reisterer said she has friends from elsewhere who tell her Vicksburg “is now the place to go.”

With an incredulous laugh, she added: “That would have never been said before.”

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