TreeAlive
← All Michigan markers

John Wesley Fallas House / John W. Fallas

Kent County · dedicated 1988 · 13893 Covered Bridge Road, Vergennes Township

John Wesley Fallas built this house in 1842 in the village which bears his family name. Fallas platted the village on land he purchased from the U.S. government in 1839. That year, after a bridge had been built across the Flat River, he constructed a three-story sawmill with a chair factory on the top floor. In 1840 he built the first gristmill in the area next to his sawmill on the river. He used lumber from his sawmill to build this house, the oldest Greek Revival-style structure in the township. John W. Fallas John Wesley Fallas was born in 1812 at Nelson, New York, where his parents, William and Hannah (Stone) Fallas, had lived since leaving Massachusetts in 1804. After spending his childhood at Dryden, New York, he moved to Michigan in 1837, and the rest of the family followed. In 1841 John went back to New York to marry Phoebe Brown. After the couple’s return to Fallasburg they had two sons, Henry B. and Charles Wesley Fallas. John and his wife lived in this house until their deaths in 1896 and 1891 respectively.

Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, Stanford Libraries

Marker data: Michigan History Center

See your own family's places through time.

Start with your family tree