Praire Ronde
101 E Prairie Street
The Rise
The corner of Main and Prairie Streets is one of the most recognizable intersections in downtown Vicksburg—the point where the village’s two primary commercial streets have met since its earliest days. For as long as there has been a downtown, there has been commerce on this corner.
By 1880, Henry Odell was operating a grocery, flour, feed, and seed store here—one of the businesses that supported daily life in the Village during The Mill’s early years. By the early 1900s, C.L. Major brought clothes and shoes to the corner, serving a steadily growing community alongside the Lee Paper Company just blocks away.
In a small town, a corner building is never just a building. It is a landmark—a meeting point, and part of how people understand where they are.
The Fall
For much of the twentieth century, 101 East Prairie served as a retail storefront—clothing, groceries, shoes, and more—the kind of place every small town once had on its most prominent corner. It carried Vicksburg through The Mill’s peak years, when the community was active enough to support that kind of daily commerce on Main Street.
What followed was not defined by The Mill’s closure, but by the same forces that reshaped downtowns across America—the automobile, the highway, and eventually the mall. As travel to nearby cities like Kalamazoo became easier, the pull of shopping on Prairie Street weakened, and buildings like this one were left without the steady activity they once relied on.
The Rejuvenation
101 and 103 E. Prairie were restored together as The Mill Group’s first downtown project, connected by a new passage that unified the two buildings into a single space. When Mackenzies Bakery opened at 103, 101 found a new purpose as the home of the Prairie Ronde Artist Gallery—the public face of one of the region’s up and coming champions of arts and culture in southwest Michigan.
Since 2017, Prairie Ronde Artist Residency has welcomed artists from across the country and around the world to Vicksburg for immersive five- to six-week stays. Each artist is supported with a stipend, travel grant, and housing within the Village—creating the space to explore, create, and engage deeply with the community and the vast industrial landscape of The Mill. In return, every artist contributes a work to the program’s growing permanent collection, which now includes pieces from nearly 200 artists.
The gallery at 101 East Prairie is where that work lives—a rotating exhibition anchored by a collection that grows with every residency. It is open to the public and free to visit.
In 2025, Prairie Ronde received the Epic Award from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo.
“Prairie Ronde shows that art thrives when it belongs to everyone.” — Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, 2025 Community Arts Awards
