Harvey Briggs Rowlson

The area where the original Cook and Ferris homes was a desireable location. Harvey Briggs Rowlson built a home for his family on West Street, almost directly across from the North and West Street juncture. Like Cook and Ferris, Rowlson came to Hillsdale County from New York State. In Hillsdale County he worked as a printer's devil, an apprentice in aprinting establishment who mixed ink and fetched the mirror-image individual metal letters that were set up, one by one, to produce the newspaper. He began working in 1844 in Jonesville for the Hillsdale County Gazette. Two years later, before he could even vote, he partnered with Stephen D. Clark to establish the Hillsdale Whig-Standard, whose motto was "Magnanimity in politics is the truest wisdom." This was a piece of advice that could be applied today … but one that may not have applied even to Harvey! In that time, journalism was firmly partisan. Harvey's paper was to act as a voice for the Whigs, to balance the influence of the Hillsdale County Gazette, a Democratic-leaning paper. Harvey Rowlson's paper had something of an identity crisis, changing names several times. It eventually settled into being The Hillsdale Daily News after a circuitous publishing pathway.

Many of the early Hillsdale families became related through various marriages. Harvey married a daughter of Eli VanValkenburgh, though they later divorced.