On October 16, 1940, a man named Edmon Earl Staley registered for the draft. For his address he wrote R.F.D. No. 1, Dyess, Arkansas. For his employer he wrote “Self.” Ten years later a census taker found Edmond E. Staley and his wife, Mary, living in Marshall, Michigan, where he worked a press in a sheet-metal plant. [38][40]
This history is about the three places in and around those two records. Dyess was a federal farm colony built in the Arkansas cotton Delta during the Depression, next door to a far larger private plantation enterprise, and home to the boy who became Johnny Cash. Albion grew up at a fork in the Kalamazoo River around mills, a Methodist college and then foundries and fastener plants. Marshall, twelve miles west, was laid out to be a state capital, never became one, and kept its nineteenth-century streets instead. [30][33][10][16]
The three places don’t share a county, a river or an economy. What links them is a family that moved from one to the others. Parts of that move are on paper. Other parts survive only in family memory. So each place gets its own history first. After that the story comes back to the family, and it says plainly which parts rest on records and which rest on recollection.
Albion’s part in the story of Detroit’s Purple Gang, a burglary operation broken up by a June 1936 raid, is told here in its place in Albion’s own chronology. It is separate from the migration story. [4][6]
PART I / THE ARKANSAS DELTA
Dyess Colony: the government builds a farm town
By the early 1930s Arkansas’s small farmers and tenants had lived through the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, drought, collapsing cotton prices and then the Depression. In May 1934 the state’s relief administrator, William Reynolds Dyess, started what was officially called “Colonization Project No. 1” on low, heavily timbered land in Mississippi County. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration set up the early federal framework, and more than a thousand men drawn from the relief rolls did the building. The aim was to give roughly 500 farm families land of their own so they would no longer depend on relief. [30][31]
What a family actually got was a starting point. The homestead was a modest house and outbuildings on twenty to forty acres, and much of that land still had to be cleared of timber and stumps and then drained before it would grow a crop. Cotton, corn and soybeans were the main crops. Gardens and livestock fed the household. The 1936 colony map shows numbered farms strung along roads and drainage ditches, with a small civic center in the middle instead of a grid of town streets. By the late 1930s that center had a school, churches, a bank, stores, a cotton gin, a feed mill, a cannery, a clinic and a theater. Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1936, and the experiment got national attention. For the people living there it meant mud, debt, hard work and school, and a community they built as they went. [30][31]
Ownership came with conditions. Colonists took government advances, served a probationary period and were evaluated before they were allowed to buy. Poor construction, debt, political fights and shifts in federal management all ate away at the idea of independent farming. And the colony was for white families only. Black tenants and farmworkers shared the same Delta poverty, but the colony selected only white applicants, so whatever Dyess offered was not offered to them. Dyess wasn’t incorporated as a town until 1964, and it still shows its origin as a settlement planned by the federal government. [30][31][32]
NEXT DOOR
The Lee Wilson empire
About ten miles east of Dyess was the town of Wilson, headquarters of Lee Wilson & Company. Robert E. Lee Wilson started with a sawmill in 1885 and built it into a combined cotton, timber, railroad and retail business. When he died in 1933 the estate held more than 65,000 acres of farmland. The company owned the housing and businesses in Wilson and several other communities, ran gins and stores, and kept its workers inside an economy centered on the company. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas describes both sides of that arrangement. There were paternalistic protections, and there was coercion, including pay in plantation scrip and limits on what workers could take with them when they left. That record doesn’t fit neatly with the company’s own picture of a harmonious farming community. [33]
The colony and the company were separate institutions, but they did meet over land. Arkansas State University’s 2010 Dyess master plan lists Lee Wilson & Company, the Creamery Package Company and Drainage District No. 9 among the interests tied to the land first considered for the colony. Historian Fred Carl Smith, working from New Deal records, adds the detail that matters: a proposed purchase of 20,000 acres from those interests fell through. The colony went up instead on 15,144 acres of tax-forfeited, cut-over swampland acquired through a receiver and the drainage district. So the record doesn’t show Lee Wilson & Company selling the colony its land. Still less does it show that Dyess residents worked for Wilson. [31][32]
A Lee Wilson promotional booklet from about 1943 shows how the company wanted to be seen: tens of thousands of acres of cotton, tractors, processing plants, workers and company-maintained communities. It dates from the years this family remembers living in the area, and it is a useful record of what the company claimed about itself. It can’t settle what working conditions were like, and it can’t say who worked for whom. Dyess was a federal resettlement colony. Wilson was a private plantation enterprise next door. A Dyess postal address puts a person near the Wilson operation. It doesn’t put them on the Wilson payroll or on Wilson land. [34][32]
FARM NO. 266
Johnny Cash’s boyhood
Ray and Carrie Cash moved their children to Dyess in the mid-1930s. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas and the National Endowment for the Humanities say 1935, and Arkansas State University’s 2010 plan says 1936. The sources agree on the place: a five-room house on Farm No. 266, off Road 3, about two and a half miles from the colony center. The National Park Service identifies it as a Federal Emergency Relief Administration farmhouse and a nationally recognized historic place. The boy who grew up there, J. R. Cash, did the same clearing, draining and cotton work as every other family in the colony’s first generation. [30][31][35][36]
His music held on to that childhood. The family cut trees and cleared fields, and the children helped tend and pick cotton. The 1937 flood became part of the memory behind “Five Feet High and Rising,” and “Pickin’ Time” is about a family living on the cotton harvest. Gospel singing, the radio, the local school and farm work all went into his musical education. In 1944 his older brother Jack died after an accident with a saw in a school workshop. Cash carried that loss for the rest of his life. J. R. graduated from Dyess High School in 1950. The restored farmhouse now tells the colony’s story along with his. [31][36][37]
The Cash farm number is known. The Staleys’ is not. Family memory places them near the Cash place, but nothing reviewed so far shows neighboring farms, a personal acquaintance, or even that the Staleys were enrolled colonists. The 1936 map makes the memory testable. Find a Staley homestead number and the farm can be located on it. A WPA-era list of colonists by name and farm number has been requested from Arkansas archives. Until that entry has been checked, “near Johnny Cash” remains family recollection. [31][32][43]
PART II / CALHOUN COUNTY, MICHIGAN
Before the towns: the Forks and the Chicago Road
Albion’s municipal history names the Potawatomi as the first people on the land where the city now stands. It starts its settler history with the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, in which that land was ceded to the United States. The treaty changed who held legal title. It didn’t empty the land. The nineteenth-century town histories that follow were written by the people who benefited from that transfer, and they should be read with that in mind. [10][11]
Water decided where both towns went. Albion grew where the north and south branches of the Kalamazoo River meet, a spot long called “the Forks.” Marshall’s founders chose ground near the Kalamazoo and Rice Creek. The rivers turned mill wheels. The river valleys, the Territorial or Chicago Road, and later the railroads linked farms, shops and travelers to markets across southern Michigan, and brought new settlers in along the same routes. [10][11][16]
Only about twelve miles apart, the two towns still grew into very different places. Marshall became the seat of Calhoun County. Albion, to the east, built its own college and its own factories. A family could live in one town and work, worship or shop in the other, but the two were never interchangeable. That matters when you’re reading old addresses and family stories. [11][16]
PART III / ALBION
From the Forks to a college town
Paul Tenney Peabody and his wife, Eleanor, came from New York in 1833 and built a log house near the Forks. Later settlers and a land venture called the Albion Company laid the groundwork for a village, and mills on the river ground grain and sawed lumber for the farms around it. Jesse Crowell became the young town’s chief promoter and, by the city’s chronology, its first postmaster in 1838. The name Albion came from the development company, not from the later college or any factory. [10][11]
Methodist education came early, but its dates need care. Albion College traces its origin to an 1835 seminary charter, and that charter was first tied to a proposed site at Spring Arbor. The seminary’s location was moved to Albion in 1839, and local historian Frank Passic reports that no classes were ever held at the planned Spring Arbor sites. The city’s short history just says “established in 1835.” However the dates are counted, the school became a lasting anchor for Albion, as an employer and a center of town life. It stood alongside the factories rather than in place of them. [10][22]
Railroads and roads extended the town’s reach. The city dates the railroad’s arrival to 1852. A later planning history names the Chicago Road, the rail lines and eventually Interstate 94 as the town’s successive transportation advantages. Albion incorporated as a village in 1855 and as a city in 1885. A public school opened in 1850, a water system in 1885 and a Carnegie library in 1917. These were the ordinary pieces a settlement needed to become a lasting civic place. [10][11]
THE FACTORY TOWN
The Malleable and the people it brought
The Albion Malleable Iron Company began in December 1888, organized by Warren S. Kessler and local investors to cast parts for farm implements. Around the turn of the century it expanded onto North Albion Street, and from 1902 it made automotive castings, which tied Albion’s fortunes to the automobile. Other manufacturers worked in town too, but the Malleable is what made Albion a factory town. [10][12]
Its hiring reached well beyond Michigan. European immigrants came before World War I, and a later local history records Mexican workers recruited in the 1940s. The company also recruited Black workers from the South. Citing the Albion Recorder of November 17, 1916, Passic describes a first trainload of 64 men from the Pensacola, Florida, area, recruited under company officer Montford B. Murray. On their first night, twelve men shared one room. Housing around Gale and Culver Streets became the core of a Black community that grew as relatives followed. The jobs paid industrial wages, but nobody promised decent housing. [12][13][14]
The community that grew from that recruitment built churches, businesses and neighborhoods. Passic’s account mentions Black neighborhood schools and churches, a Booker T. Washington Association, and houses torn down during 1960s urban renewal. The city’s own history describes a population with roots in Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Mexico and the American South. The company’s recruiting brought people to Albion, but it was the families who made their lives there. [10][13]
The Malleable has two endings, and they’re easy to confuse. The company merged in 1967 to become part of Hayes-Albion, and that is where the city’s account stops. The Albion plant kept running through more ownership changes until it closed on June 28, 2002, and that is where Passic’s plant history ends. The closing is part of the larger Midwestern story of deindustrialization: jobs that didn’t come back and factory land that is hard to reuse. [10][11][12]
NUTS, CASTERS AND A CENTURY ON CLARK STREET
Decker Manufacturing and the Konkles
Albion’s other long-running factory story began in 1927, when Victor Decker, Walter Konkle and Eric Biewend founded Decker Screw Products Company. The company’s own history names all three, so Konkle was a co-founder, not the sole founder. Passic places the first shop in the former Cement Casket Company building at North Huron and East Mulberry Streets. Demand grew fast enough that by 1928 the company had moved to a larger building on Clark Street, which is still its Albion home. The first building is gone, and the company has now worked from Clark Street for nearly a century. [24][25]
A patent shows the early company doing more than screws. Walter R. Konkle, named as an inventor living in Albion, applied in 1934 for a ball-bearing furniture caster. U.S. Patent 2,090,960 was granted on August 24, 1937, and assigned to Decker Screw Products. The patent documents Konkle’s engineering and the company’s stake in it. It says nothing about how many casters Decker made or sold, because a patent records an invention, not a production run. [26]
In 1945 the company became Decker Manufacturing. Its official timeline calls the change part of a broader business strategy and says little more. Decker became known for industrial fasteners: hex nuts, weld nuts, pipe plugs and cold-formed parts for automotive and other uses. It’s less visible work than an iron foundry’s, but the vehicles and machinery built elsewhere depend on it. Making those parts at scale takes tooling, forming, inspection and reliable delivery of small pieces in very large numbers. [24][29]
The company kept investing in Albion. By its own account the plant reached 130,000 square feet in 1971. It lists laboratory accreditation in 1994, later quality certifications, four optical sorting machines in 2019 and a one-inch nut-forming machine in 2023. These are the company’s own milestones and haven’t been independently audited. Still, they show a manufacturer investing in measurement and process control as the auto supply chain changed around it. [24]
The Konkle name runs through the company’s leadership. Henry R. “Hank” Konkle’s 2011 obituary names his father as Walter Roy Konkle. It says Hank retired as Decker’s president in 1994 and then served as board chairman and later chairman emeritus. In 2026 the company named Mark Konkle president and chief executive, describing him as a grandson of co-founder Walter; he had joined the board in December 2023. The current leadership page also lists Steve Konkle as chief operating officer but doesn’t say how he is related to Walter or Mark. These are business records, and they don’t add up to a family tree. [27][28][24]
Decker also expanded beyond Albion without leaving it. It set up Decker Fasteners Limited in Hudson, Ohio, in 2000. That subsidiary moved to Peninsula, Ohio, in 2003 and added 28,000 square feet there in 2016. The company credits itself with General Motors supplier awards from 2012 to 2015, and in 2026 it announced a new processing and shipping site in Burlington, Ontario. The Ontario site was an addition. Manufacturing stayed at 703 North Clark Street. When the Malleable plant closed in 2002, Decker was still in Albion, smaller and more specialized, and still making things there. [24][28][12]
DETROIT’S GANG
The Purple Gang: rise and breakup
The Purple Gang came out of Detroit’s lower east side, a mostly immigrant neighborhood sometimes called “Little Jerusalem.” The Detroit Historical Society traces its core to four Burnstein brothers, Raymond, Joseph, Isadore and Abraham, and their associates, who had been known as the Sugar House Boys. Their early mentors included Charles Leiter and Henry Shorr of the Oakland Sugar House. It was a loose confederation, not an organization with a fixed roster and a chain of command. Even the name has several competing origin stories, and none of them is settled. [1]
Prohibition turned Detroit into a gateway. Liquor came across the river from Canada, and the Purples began by hijacking shipments before moving into supplying and protecting the trade. According to the Detroit Historical Society, Al Capone bought Old Log Cabin whiskey from them rather than fight for Detroit. That was a business relationship. It doesn’t mean Capone ran the gang. [1][2]
Liquor was one line of business among several, alongside gambling, narcotics, intimidation and extortion. The best-documented racket outside liquor was the Cleaners and Dyers War of 1925–28. A trade association supposedly formed to stabilize Detroit’s struggling cleaning business turned into a way to extract compulsory dues and sell violent “protection.” Shops that refused to pay were harassed, their goods ruined, their owners assaulted and their buildings bombed. In 1928 Charles Jacoby Jr. and twelve alleged gang associates were tried for conspiracy to extort. They were acquitted. [3]
The Society calls the 1927 Milaflores killings the first machine-gun murders by an organized-crime group in Detroit. Its account of the Collingwood case adds kidnapping, theft, prostitution and wire-service rackets to the list. Witnesses were afraid to testify. By the late 1920s, the Society says, the gang dominated the city’s underworld. [1][2]
Then came the killings that broke it. On September 16, 1931, three men from a liquor-running faction called the “Little Jewish Navy,” Joe Lebowitz, Hymie Paul and Isadore Sutker, came to Detroit’s Collingwood Manor apartments for what they thought was a peace meeting. They were shot dead. Their driver, Sol Levine, survived and testified, and Ray Burnstein, Harry Keywell and Irving Milberg were sentenced to life. More convictions, killings and infighting followed, and by 1935, the Society says, the confederation had splintered and no longer ran Detroit’s underworld. The Albion episode comes from those years of breakup, when the gang was past its peak. [1][2]
Harry Fleisher was one of the figures who stayed prominent after the senior leaders went to prison. His brothers Sam and Louis are the ones who turn up in Albion. The family relationship is clear. Exactly who belonged to what, who answered to whom, and who was responsible for each later crime are not. [4]
Liquor paid for the gang, extortion extended its reach and violence protected both. In the end the violence broke the alliance apart.
ALBION’S CHAPTER
1935–36: a junkyard, a garage and an armored car
According to Passic, Louis Fleisher was living at 108 South Monroe Street in Albion by August 1935. He and Sam Bernstein, who used the alias “Stone,” acquired the Riverside Iron and Metal Company junkyard near the Market Place, which Passic describes as a front for criminal activity. Sam Fleisher also spent time in town before going to federal prison in April 1936 on an income-tax evasion conviction. Most of these details come from Passic’s later local-history research, not from surviving business records reproduced here. [4]
Albion suited them. It sat on the Detroit–Chicago corridor, far enough from Detroit for some distance and close enough to stay connected. Passic identifies a garage stall in the Market Place building known as the “Frog Pond,” where an armored Graham-Paige sedan was kept out of sight, and names the Streetcar Tavern on Austin Avenue as a meeting place. Two other stories have weaker support. Meetings at the Bohm Theatre come from a ticket seller’s recollection told to Passic decades later, and lodging at the Parker Inn is reported explicitly as rumor. Neither can confirm that a meeting took place. [4][5]
In March 1936 thieves took the safe from Albion’s Kroger store. A string of safe burglaries across southern Michigan drew police attention to an unusual gunmetal-gray Graham-Paige. On June 3 about twenty-five officers raided the junkyard and the garage. By Passic’s reconstruction they seized the car and arrested Louis and Nellie Fleisher, Sam and Lillian Bernstein, junkyard worker Irving Schuman and others. [5][6]
The car was the raid’s centerpiece. Passic’s 2002 article quotes the Albion Evening Recorder of June 3, 1936: bullet-resistant side glass three-quarters of an inch thick, a rear shield with firing ports, protected tires, revolving license plates, and a removable post and seats to make room for a stolen safe. Police also reported firearms, ammunition, explosives and burglary tools. That newspaper description is the best contemporary evidence of the operation. The complete original issue has not yet been checked for this article. [6]
The record here is specific: named people, named places, a string of burglaries, and a June 1936 raid in which local and state officers broke up the operation. [5][6]
NINE YEARS LATER
1945: the murder of Senator Hooper
On January 11, 1945, state senator Warren G. Hooper, who lived in Albion, was shot in his car near Springport on his way home. He was due to testify before a grand jury investigating bribery in the legislature. The killing became one of Michigan’s most notorious unsolved murders. In a Michigan Public discussion, the state archivist explains why it is still an open question even though conspiracy convictions followed. [8]
Investigators worked on the theory that Hooper was killed to stop his testimony. A newspaper report of May 17, 1945, described Harry and Sammy Fleisher, Myron “Mike” Selik and Pete Mahoney being held for trial on a charge of conspiracy to murder him, and it identified the Fleishers and Selik as former Purple Gang members. A jury convicted all four on July 31, 1945. [7][9]
In People v. Fleish (1948), the Michigan Supreme Court upheld the conspiracy convictions of Harry Fleisher, Sammy Fleisher and Selik, and set aside Mahoney’s conviction without a new trial. The ruling settles the conspiracy convictions. It does not name the gunman or establish in court who ordered the killing, and the murder itself was never solved. [7][8]
Hooper’s murder is why Albion’s memory of the Purple Gang extends into the 1940s. Passic notes, though, that the Fleishers no longer lived in Albion by 1945. The 1936 raid and the 1945 case are two separate episodes that involved some of the same people. [4]
CIVIC ALBION
More than a factory town
The college, churches, schools, shops, the river and the town’s cultural venues gave people in Albion identities beyond the factory gate. The Bohm Theatre opened on Christmas Day 1929 for movies and vaudeville, went into decline, and was later restored by local effort. The Gardner House Museum and the Albion Historical Society keep a different kind of record: ordinary homes, tools, photographs and civic memory. The Festival of the Forks began in 1967 to celebrate local heritage and ethnic diversity, and Albion was named an All-America City in 1974. None of that undoes the industrial losses. It shows people continuing to build a town together through them. [10]
Change has been uneven. The city’s twenty-first-century planning study describes an economy moving away from manufacturing and names Albion College as a continuing anchor institution. It treats the Kalamazoo River and trails as assets, and it treats former industrial sites and vacant properties as problems still to be solved. A plan is evidence of where a city wants to go, not proof that it has recovered from losing its factories. [11]
PART IV / MARSHALL
Built for a capital that went elsewhere
In 1830 Sidney Ketchum, a land speculator from New York, picked out a site near Rice Creek and the Kalamazoo River. He came back in 1831 with relatives and other settlers. His brother George built a sawmill, and the village was platted on August 29 of that year. It was named for Chief Justice John Marshall and soon became the seat of Calhoun County. Ketchum wanted more than a mill town. He imagined a planned center of commerce and the professions, and he hoped it would become the capital of the new state. [16][17]
The town was built to match. The National Park Service’s landmark nomination describes investors and skilled newcomers bringing eastern building traditions, pattern-book Greek Revival designs and an orderly town plan. Marshall’s buildings, public and private, made the case that it was an important place, ready for judges, legislators, merchants and everyone who would serve them. But Marshall never became Michigan’s capital. After statehood in 1837 the capital stayed in Detroit until Lansing was chosen in 1847. The failed bid is a large part of why such a small city was built so ambitiously. [16][18]
The railroad kept the ambition going for a while. The Michigan Central Railroad set up shops in Marshall in 1844, bringing skilled workers and trade, and Mechanics Hall, built in 1845, stands for the organized trades of that boom. Churches, stores, houses and public buildings went up through the 1850s and 1860s. Then in 1874 the railroad moved its machine shops to Jackson. Marshall lost its industrial engine and went quiet while other Michigan cities grew. The slowdown was hard on the workers and businesses who lived through it, and it is also the reason so much of the older town survived. [16]
FREEDOM & THE LAW
January 1847: the Crosswhite rescue
Marshall’s history isn’t only about architecture. In January 1847 men came to town to seize Adam and Sarah Crosswhite and their children, a family who had escaped slavery. Marshall residents stepped in and helped the family get away. The landmark nomination records the event and the Crosswhite monument put up in 1923. A separate National Park Service account traces the family’s escape by rail through Jackson toward Detroit. The episode shows how dangerous a northern town could still be for people who had escaped slavery, and it shows the townspeople who refused to let the family be taken. [16][19]
The story is easy to tell wrong in two ways. The rescue doesn’t mean all of Marshall opposed slavery, and it isn’t mainly a story about kind neighbors. The Crosswhites had already taken the biggest risk by freeing themselves. What the town did mattered because a local crowd and a rail line stood between the family and recapture. The railroad that carried Marshall’s commercial hopes also carried people toward freedom. [16][19]
THE CITY THAT KEPT ITS STREETS
Patent medicine, the Brooks family and preservation
After the rail shops left, Marshall got by on smaller businesses, among them patent medicine and the Brooks Rupture Appliance Company, founded by Charles E. Brooks. His son Harold C. Brooks was mayor from 1925 to 1931. Working with architect Howard Young, Harold Brooks bought and restored important houses and pushed the city toward planning that valued what it already had. The Park Service credits that long attention with keeping Marshall’s historic core unusually intact. [16]
The architecture isn’t one “Victorian” look. Greek Revival buildings recall the optimism of the capital years. Italianate and Queen Anne houses and storefronts mark later prosperity. Colonial Revival, bungalow, foursquare and Art Deco buildings show that Marshall kept building into the twentieth century. Around the downtown green, the landmark nomination singles out the 1835 National House inn, the converted Town Hall, and the 1860 Abner Pratt House, known as the Honolulu House for its unusual mix of Hawaiian and European design. Mechanics Hall recalls the railroad years. These landmarks sit inside a larger tree-lined grid of shops, churches, civic spaces and homes. The town is not a set of isolated showpieces. The 1991 National Historic Landmark nomination surveyed 844 properties and stressed the integrity of the whole district. That number is a historical survey count, not a current inventory. [16]
Preservation keeps what survives, and buildings don’t tell the whole story on their own. The landmark designation is about architecture. The Crosswhite monument is a reminder that legal conflict, escape and race are part of the same streets. The loss of the rail shops and the patent-medicine economy explain why some periods of building were busier than others. To read Marshall well, you have to ask what the buildings show and whose lives and labor they leave out. [16]
PART V / THE ROAD NORTH
The Staleys: from Dyess to Calhoun County
Family recollection describes the move as Dyess → Albion → Marshall, made while the children were young and with relatives already in Albion. The earliest firm record is the October 16, 1940, Selective Service card on which Edmon/Edmond Earl Staley gave his address as R.F.D. No. 1, Dyess and his employer as “Self.” It puts him in the Dyess postal area and shows him reporting himself as self-employed. It does not show a numbered colony farm, cotton tenancy or a job with the Wilson company. A March 1943 church paper reports a Dyess congregation led by “Brother Earl Staley.” The name and place fit Edmond Earl, but the short notice offers no second detail to confirm it is the same man. [38][39]
Albion was a natural place to go. The 1972 obituary of Daniel L. Staley says he moved from Little Rock to Albion in 1945 and later worked as a custodian at a firm it calls “Decker Nut Mfg. Co.” That looks like Albion’s fastener maker, though the name hasn’t been confirmed as a formal company name. The obituary puts another member of the family in Albion before Edmond’s household came to Michigan. It says nothing about where that household first stayed. Albion had been drawing workers north from the South since at least 1916, but nothing found connects this family to any recruiting effort. [42][13]
Mary Jane Staley’s obituary dates the household’s arrival in Michigan to 1949, its settling in Marshall in 1950, and a move to Albion in 1962. The original 1950 census independently lists Edmond E. and Mary Staley in Marshall, with Edmond working as a press operator in sheet-metal manufacturing. Together those records establish the move from Dyess to Michigan and a Marshall home by 1950. They leave room for the remembered short stay in Albion first, but no address or dated record of it has been found. Mary Jane later worked at Albion College, according to her obituary. That was her job, not Edmond’s. [40][41][43]
So what connects the three places is people who moved, not a government program. Nothing found here points to an organized Dyess-to-Michigan resettlement or a personal link between the Staleys and the Cash family. What the records do show is a household leaving a cotton-country postal route for factory work, churches and neighborhoods in Calhoun County, and later settling in Albion. It began among a government-supervised farm colony and a company plantation next door, and it led to a sheet-metal press in Marshall. That route is historically meaningful without claiming more about farm numbers or employers than the records can support. [30][33][40][41]
PART VI / THE TOWNS TOGETHER
The towns now
Albion and Marshall are still tied together by Calhoun County, the river, the roads and public institutions. One of the most concrete ties came in 2016, when Albion voters approved annexing their school district into Marshall Public Schools after years of falling enrollment and revenue. An Albion city planning packet records the decision as a fiscal necessity and a hard transition for the community. Schools carry a town’s identity, its alumni memories and its sense of where families belong, so this was more than an administrative change. [15]
The river links recent environmental history to the towns’ founding. In July 2010 an Enbridge pipeline ruptured near Marshall, contaminating Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. The Environmental Protection Agency led the federal response and ordered the recovery of submerged oil and contaminated sediment. The spill moved through the same watershed both towns had depended on since the 1830s. A river is scenery and heritage, and it is also a working system and an infrastructure corridor. What happens upstream reaches everyone below. [20]
Marshall’s industrial future is changing again. Ford announced its BlueOval Battery Park Michigan project in 2023. In June 2026 Ford reported more than 500 employees and the first complete battery cells assembled at the plant, with production verification underway and shipments planned for later in 2026. Ford also said more than 70 percent of those employees came from Marshall, Albion and Battle Creek. That is the employer’s figure, not a final jobs count, but it shows how much the three towns share a labor market. Albion’s planning documents describe a search for new manufacturing and services alongside the college, downtown and riverfront, and Decker’s Clark Street plant is still running. [21][23][11][24]
If these histories teach one thing, it is not to mistake a single employer, institution or headline for the whole community. The Malleable closed and Albion is still there. The railroad left and Marshall is still there. The federal colony became an incorporated town. The people who moved between them made lives wherever they landed.
CHRONOLOGY
Three places, two centuries
- The Treaty of Chicago cedes Potawatomi land; Albion’s municipal history begins its settler account here. [10]
- Sidney Ketchum selects and plats Marshall; the Peabody family settles at the Forks of the Kalamazoo. [10][16]
- A Methodist seminary is chartered and later moved to Albion; Marshall gains rail shops, helps the Crosswhites escape and loses the capital to Lansing. [16][18][22]
- Rail reaches Albion, which incorporates as a village and then a city. Marshall’s railroad shops leave for Jackson in 1874. [10][16]
- Lee Wilson & Company grows from a sawmill into a plantation and company-town system of more than 65,000 acres. [33]
- Albion Malleable Iron begins casting farm-implement parts, then automotive parts. [12]
- A first group of 64 Black workers recruited from the Pensacola area arrives to work at the Malleable. [13]
- The Great Mississippi Flood deepens the Delta hardship that the Dyess project would later address. [30]
- Victor Decker, Walter Konkle and Eric Biewend found Decker Screw Products in Albion; it moves to Clark Street the next year. [24][25]
- Detroit’s Purple Gang rises and splinters; Harold Brooks champions preservation in Marshall; Albion’s Bohm Theatre opens. [1][10][16]
- Construction begins on Dyess “Colonization Project No. 1,” planned for about 500 farm families. [30][31]
- Walter R. Konkle applies for and receives a caster patent assigned to Decker Screw Products. [26]
- The Cash family settles on Dyess Farm No. 266 (sources differ on the year); the 1937 flood later shows up in Cash’s music. [30][31][35]
- Gang associates operate from an Albion junkyard and garage; officers raid both and seize an armored car on June 3, 1936. [4][6]
- Edmond Earl Staley gives a Dyess address on his 1940 draft card; a 1943 church notice names an Earl Staley at Dyess. [38][39]
- Decker Screw Products becomes Decker Manufacturing. [24]
- Senator Hooper is murdered; four men are convicted of conspiracy, and three convictions are upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court. [7][8]
- Mary Jane Staley’s obituary dates the family’s move to Michigan to 1949; the 1950 census places Edmond and Mary in Marshall. The remembered first stop in Albion has no record yet. [40][41][43]
- Mary Jane’s obituary records the household’s move to Albion. [41]
- Albion Malleable merges into Hayes-Albion; the Albion plant keeps running. [12]
- Decker reports its Albion plant has grown to 130,000 square feet. [24]
- The National Park Service nomination documents Marshall’s historic landmark district. [16]
- Hank Konkle retires as Decker’s president and stays on in board leadership. [27]
- Decker opens an Ohio subsidiary; the Albion Malleable plant closes in 2002. [24][12]
- A pipeline spill near Marshall contaminates the Kalamazoo River; Albion’s school district later joins Marshall’s. [15][20]
- Decker adds equipment, names Mark Konkle president and opens an Ontario site. Ford reports first cells and hiring at its Marshall battery plant, with shipments still ahead. [24][28][23]
PEOPLE & PLACES
Who’s who
Dyess, Wilson and the road north
William Reynolds Dyess
Arkansas relief administrator whose 1934 plan became the federal Dyess farm colony. [30]
Robert E. Lee Wilson
Built a private plantation and company-town network east of Dyess. His company did not run the colony. [33][32]
Founders, freedom seekers and builders
Paul Tenney & Eleanor Peabody
Among the first recorded settler families at the Forks, in 1833. [10]
Sidney & George Ketchum
Marshall’s founders. Sidney chased the capital; George built the sawmill. [16]
Adam & Sarah Crosswhite
Freed themselves from slavery; Marshall residents helped them escape recapture in 1847. [16]
Walter R. Konkle
Co-founder of Decker Screw Products in 1927; his 1937 caster patent was assigned to the company. [24][26]
Hank and Mark Konkle
Hank led Decker as president until 1994; Mark, a grandson of Walter, became president in 2026. Business records, not a full family tree. [27][28]
Montford B. Murray
Albion Malleable officer who led the company’s recruitment of Southern workers in 1916. [14]
Harold C. Brooks
Marshall manufacturer, mayor and preservation advocate who worked with architect Howard Young. [16]
The Purple Gang and the Hooper case
The Burnstein brothers
Raymond, Joseph, Isadore and Abraham, the core of the early Detroit gang. Ray’s Collingwood conviction marked its collapse. [1][2]
Harry Fleisher
Stayed prominent after the early leaders went to prison; later convicted in the Hooper conspiracy. [4][7]
Sam and Louis Fleisher
Brothers tied to the Albion operation. Louis figures in the 1936 raid; Sam’s Hooper conspiracy conviction was upheld. [4][5][7]
Myron “Mike” Selik
Convicted in the Hooper conspiracy; conviction upheld. [7]
Warren G. Hooper
Albion’s state senator, killed in 1945 before he could testify to a grand jury. [8]
EVIDENCE
What the record shows, and what it doesn’t
Three former gang figures’ Hooper conspiracy convictions stood.
The Michigan Supreme Court upheld the Fleishers’ and Selik’s convictions and set aside Mahoney’s. The murder itself remains unsolved. [7]
The Purples supplied Capone.
The Detroit Historical Society describes a whiskey-supply relationship, not Capone running the gang. [1]
Meetings at the Bohm; lodging at the Parker Inn.
One is a later eyewitness recollection, the other an acknowledged rumor. Neither carries the weight of the raid or the court record. [4]
Purple Gang men were involved in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The Detroit Historical Society says members allegedly served as spotters. That is not an established finding about who planned or carried out the Chicago killings. [1]
DOCUMENTATION
Sources and method
This edition rewrites and reorganizes an earlier version of this history using the same evidence. Source numbers match that version, which is why they don’t run in order through the text. No new factual sources were added.
The Michigan chapters draw on municipal histories and plans, the National Park Service landmark nomination for Marshall, state and federal agency pages, and the research of Albion historian Frank Passic. Those sources answer different questions. A city history, a landmark survey and a retrospective newspaper column each capture part of a town, and none of them records every resident’s experience. Albion’s 2022 planning packet was a draft and is used here for geography and economic context, not as adopted policy. The Malleable’s 1967 corporate merger and its 2002 plant closure are kept distinct. The Decker account combines the company’s own dated timeline and announcements with Passic’s note on its first building, a patent and a published obituary. Company claims about awards and expansion are attributed to the company, not independently verified.
The Dyess chapters use Arkansas State University’s 2010 master plan and Fred Carl Smith’s dissertation alongside the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities and a circa-1943 Lee Wilson company booklet. The sources disagree on the year the Cash family arrived, and this history keeps that disagreement visible. The Wilson discussion separates a failed proposed purchase from the final 15,144-acre tract. For the family route, the 1940 draft card and the original 1950 census image are record-level evidence. Mary Jane’s and Daniel’s obituaries are later accounts. The early Albion stop and nearness to the Cash farm are family recollection. Full copies of the draft card, census image, church paper, master-plan map and Wilson booklet are kept in the private research files.
The Purple Gang chapters separate contemporary reporting and a court ruling from later recollection. The full June 3, 1936, Albion Evening Recorder is still a priority to find; its car description is quoted here through Passic’s 2002 transcription. Nothing reviewed shows a Purple Gang base in Marshall. No third-party photographs are reproduced.
- Detroit Historical Society, “Purple Gang” — origins, organization, rackets, Capone connection, decline and qualified massacre allegation.
- Detroit Historical Society, “Collingwood Manor Massacre” — 1931 murders, testimony and convictions.
- Detroit Historical Society, “Cleaners and Dyers War” — labor racket, violence and 1928 acquittals.
- Frank Passic, “The Purple Gang, Part I”, Morning Star, Dec. 8, 1996 — residences, junkyard, local venues, clearly identified recollection and rumor.
- Frank Passic, “The Purple Gang, Part II”, Morning Star, Dec. 15, 1996 — garage, burglaries and raid.
- Frank Passic, “Purple Gang Car Seized Here in 1936”, Albion Recorder, Feb. 28, 2002 — quotes the June 3, 1936 Albion Evening Recorder.
- People v. Fleish, 321 Mich. 443 (1948) — Michigan Supreme Court’s disposition of the Hooper conspiracy convictions.
- Michigan Public, “Mob murder and capital corruption” (2018), with Michigan state archivist Mark Harvey — Hooper investigation and unresolved homicide.
- Ingham County News, May 17, 1945, p. 1 — contemporary report of the conspiracy case; a copy was preserved for this research.
- City of Albion, “History” — Potawatomi land, settlement, incorporation, industry, civic and cultural chronology.
- City of Albion, 2022 comprehensive-plan draft in Planning Commission packet — river geography, town relationship, transportation, and post-industrial economy. Preserved PDF, 17.9 MB.
- Frank Passic, “The Albion Malleable Iron Company” — factory founding, recruitment, merger and 2002 closure.
- Frank Passic, “Local Black History 100 Years Old,” Morning Star, Oct. 30, 2016 — quotes a November 1916 Albion Recorder report on recruited Black workers and describes neighborhood history.
- Frank Passic, “Montford B. Murray,” Morning Star, Feb. 13, 2005 — recruitment and early Black worker housing.
- City of Albion, Aug. 24, 2016 Council packet — city planning account of school-district annexation; preserved PDF.
- National Park Service, Marshall Michigan Historic Landmark District nomination (1991) — primary federal survey of founding, rail, Crosswhite monument, architecture, industry and preservation; preserved PDF.
- Choose Marshall, “Founding of Marshall” — Ketchum brothers, county-seat designation and naming.
- Michigan State Capitol, “Three Capitols” — Detroit and Lansing capital chronology.
- National Park Service, Underground Railroad Network to Freedom additions (2021) — Crosswhite family’s rail escape through Jackson toward Detroit.
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Enbridge spill response — 2010 rupture near Marshall, river contamination and cleanup.
- City of Marshall, BlueOval Battery Park project page — 2023 announcement and planned 2026 opening, not confirmation of commercial operation.
- Frank Passic, “Falling Waters Park,” Morning Star, Oct. 9, 1994 — 1835 seminary charter at Spring Arbor and 1839 approved move to Albion.
- Ford, “BlueOval Battery Park Michigan Hits Hiring and LFP Production Milestones,” June 17, 2026 — employer-reported hiring, initial cells and planned shipments; not an independent employment audit.
- Decker Manufacturing, “The Decker Story” — official 1927–2026 history, Albion site, products, leadership and company-reported milestones; captured with raw HTML.
- Frank Passic, “The Cement Casket Company,” Morning Star, Dec. 17, 1995 — identifies the original Decker Screw headquarters in the former Huron–Mulberry building; captured with raw HTML.
- U.S. Patent 2,090,960, “Caster”, Walter R. Konkle, filed May 17, 1934, granted Aug. 24, 1937 — inventor, Albion address, patent description and assignment to Decker Screw Products; preserved HTML.
- Henry R. “Hank” Konkle obituary (2011) — public account of parentage and retirement as Decker president in 1994; not used to infer unrelated family branches.
- Decker Manufacturing, “Announcements & Press” — company announcement naming Mark Konkle president and grandson of co-founder Walter; Ontario operation; captured with raw HTML.
- Decker Manufacturing, “Products” — current product categories, including weld nuts and cold-formed components; captured with raw HTML.
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Dyess (Mississippi County)” — New Deal founding, construction, white-only selection, community facilities, Cash family, Roosevelt visit and later municipality; an original page capture is preserved, though automated access may be gated.
- Arkansas State University, Dyess Colony Redevelopment Master Plan (2010), pp. 2.1–2.18 and 3.1–3.19 — colony history, land summary, Cash account and reproduced 1936 map; original 6.7 MB PDF preserved.
- Fred Carl Smith, Shadows Over Goshen (University of Southern Mississippi dissertation, 2008), printed p. 121 — distinguishes the failed proposed Wilson/Creamery/Drainage District land purchase from the final 15,144-acre tract; original PDF preserved.
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Lee Wilson & Company” — founding, acreage, company towns, businesses and contested labor conditions; an original page capture is preserved, though automated access may be gated.
- Lee Wilson & Company promotional booklet, circa 1943, University of Memphis Special Collections — contemporary company self-description, not an independent labor audit; full original PDF and page images preserved.
- National Park Service, “Farm No. 266, Johnny Cash Boyhood Home” — FERA farmhouse, National Register place and present museum.
- National Endowment for the Humanities, “Where Johnny Cash Came From” (2023) — Cash family at Dyess, cotton labor, songs, 1935 arrival date and preservation.
- Arkansas State University Heritage Sites, Historic Dyess Colony — current public interpretation of the colony and Cash home.
- Selective Service registration of Edmon Earl Staley, Oct. 16, 1940, National Archives RG 147, accessed via Ancestry — original image gives R.F.D. No. 1, Dyess and employer “Self”; account access may be required, and image is preserved privately.
- Pentecostal Gleaner, March 1943, p. 7 — contemporary notice of “Brother Earl Staley” leading the Dyess congregation; identification with Edmond Earl remains qualified.
- 1950 U.S. census, Marshall, Michigan, ED 13-130, sheet 17, lines 24–29, National Archives original image — Edmond E. and Mary Staley household and Edmond’s sheet-metal occupation; living-generation names omitted from article.
- Mary Jane (Jackson) Staley obituary, J. Kevin Tidd Funeral Home, 2014 — reports the 1949 Michigan migration, 1950 Marshall settlement, 1962 Albion move and Mary’s later Albion College job; automated access may be gated, and a full text capture is preserved privately.
- Daniel L. Staley obituary, Battle Creek Enquirer, Apr. 10, 1972 — reports his 1945 Albion arrival and later custodian work at a firm called “Decker Nut Mfg. Co.”; newspaper access may be gated, and Albion District Library supplied a preserved original scan.
- Family recollection communicated to the researcher in 2026 — remembered early Albion stop on the Dyess-to-Marshall route, relatives in Albion and proximity to Johnny Cash; treated as oral history, not documentary placement.
