Carey Mission

The Carey Mission was established by Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy among the Potawatomi tribe of American Indians on the St. Joseph River near Niles, Michigan, United States in December, 1822. It was named for William Carey, a noted English Baptist missionary. The Carey Mission’s official nature and reputation made it a headquarters for settlers and a point from which the American frontier was extended.

Lewis Cass, the second governor of the Michigan Territory, signed the Treaty of Chicago on August 29, 1821, with the chiefs of the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi nations. The Potawatomi agreed to cede to the United States all the territory lying west and north of the St. Joseph River, and the United States agreed to provide funds for a blacksmith and a teacher, to reside on "one mile square on the south side of the St. Joseph" within a tract that the Potawatomis had reserved for their villages. McCoy, who had previously traveled to Detroit and petitioned Cass to provide funds for Indian missions in the 1821 Treaty, secured the position of teacher.

In December 1822, McCoy and his family, and a group of Indians who had elected to accompany them (32 persons in all), set out for southwestern Michigan. They emigrated from the vicinity of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to a point about a mile west of the present city of Niles, and by the following year they had built six mission houses.

The first school at Carey was opened on January 27, 1823, and originally had 30 Indian pupils. An expedition that visited the mission in June 1823 reported, "The school consists of from forty to sixty children, of which fifteen are females. They are either children of Indians, or half-breed descendants of French and Indian parents; there being about an equal number of each. It is contemplated that the school will soon be increased to one hundred."

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