“I don’t know how many cities you know, but there’s not many that don’t have a single interstate or M-road that runs through them,” City Manager Tony McGhee says of his community, Buchanan. “We are just a little bit off the beaten path.”

Originally a mill town, Buchanan once had 13 active mills operating off McCoy Creek, which flows through the city, processing grain from the surrounding agricultural areas. One of those, Pears Mills, is still standing, owned by the City. “I don’t know how many cities have an active, City-owned grist mill,” laughs McGhee.

At the turn of the 19th century, industry moved in. Clark Equipment made most of the forklifts used in the country. EV made high-end speakers and microphones. Buchanan Steel fabricated metal for planes and ships. In the late 20th century, those firms left, one after the other. “Seven thousand, eight thousand jobs, in a town of five thousand people—pretty devastating,” says McGhee.

Downtown Buchanan is also a place in transition. “Ten, 15 years ago, we had a lot of empty storefronts. We had a lot of empty buildings,” says McGhee. These days, downtown boasts a boutique hotel that sits along the creek, a new farm-to-table restaurant, a diner, a winery, and half a dozen antique stores.

The City decided that a modernizing downtown needed modern infrastructure to match. And so, they got to work. “Ninety percent of the community’s critical infrastructure was replaced as part of this project,” says McGhee. “We literally replaced everything: building-front to building-front, sidewalks, roads, water, sewer, storm—everything throughout our entire downtown.” And now, the fresh new downtown is the City of Buchanan’s entry for the 2026 Community Excellence Award.

The visioning, community input, and planning process for what the new downtown would look like took two years. Grand Rapids firm Prein&Newhof was the primary engineering partner. McGhee, who also has an engineering background, came to Buchanan from Abonmarche in January of 2025.

For funding, he says, “We bit the bullet—we borrowed a lot of money.” While the project received about $2 million in grant support—including a $1 million Revitalization and Placemaking (RAP) grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, MDOT funding, and congressional district support funds from Rep. Tim Walberg—the remaining approximately $18 million was financed by Buchanan residents.

“This took a commitment from the entire community, both to live through the construction, and to commit to the debt to do this project,” says McGhee. “You have to have confidence in yourself as a community to say, ‘You know what, this investment is going to pay off.’”

Groundbreaking took place in spring of 2025. Much of the infrastructure work was well overdue. “We were pulling water mains out of the ground that were marked 1925,” says McGhee. (The normal lifespan of water mains is 80 years.) “The sewer lines that we replaced were so bad. We had been processing about 1.1 million gallons a day for our wastewater treatment plant. When we replaced those lines, that dropped to half a million gallons. We were processing half a million gallons of groundwater every day because of inflow and infiltration from the groundwater into our pipes.”

The City also installed stormwater separator units onto the outfalls into the creek. “As far as I know, we’re probably one of the earliest, if not the earliest adopters of this in Berrien County,” says McGhee.

With the utilities replaced and everything having been dug up, the City had a golden opportunity. “We didn’t have to put the streets and sidewalks back the way they were,” says McGhee. The downtown streetscape was reconfigured into a “tabletop” design, eliminating curbs and rebuilding at a unified grade. The City installed new streetlights and rewired and repainted existing ones to maintain a consistent appearance. Additionally, string lighting now spans four blocks of downtown.

“It’s really a great flex space,” says McGhee. “We can have vehicular traffic during the day and easily reconfigure things to make it a pedestrian [plaza].

Major construction took place in the summer and fall of 2025. The City tried to make the process as painless as possible for local businesses. “The best thing we did to address it is communication, communication, and more communication.” says McGhee. Meetings were held, phone numbers were handed out, schedules were communicated online and in person. McGhee had pep talks with downtown business owners. “I said, ‘I’m going to tell you right now. By the time you get to late summer, you’re going to think the world is ending, and you’re never going to get through it. And by November, you’re going to look back and say, ‘It could have been worse,’” he says.

“And one of the business owners came up to me [after construction was complete] and said, ‘You nailed exactly the emotional cycle I went through.’”

The downtown overhaul was completed in November of 2025, and a ribbon-cutting was held. Now in its first summer, the new and improved downtown Buchanan is getting some real use. The first big festival of the year, Sip! Buchanan, was held this past May. “Being here in the middle of wine country with some great wineries, distilleries, breweries—we brought 50 of them downtown, shut down our streets,” says McGhee. “The new streetscape worked really, really well.”

Downtown Buchanan is now in the midst of an active summer schedule that includes a farmers’ market and a summer music series held in the adjacent Commons area. Flowers are being planted; benches are being installed. “We have groups coming together to plan new events and to do new things in the downtown, take advantage of that new space.” says McGhee.

“It’s really re-established a new sense of community for us here in Buchanan.”

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Emily Pinsuwan

Emily is the League’s full-time Content Writer, composing emails, articles, blog posts, and press releases. If you need words, she has many. Prior to becoming a word person, she was a restaurant person, handling catering, event management, and marketing; prior still, she was a teaching person, at a private boarding school in Massachusetts. Having earned a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Georgia, Emily is confident that she is the only League employee fluent in Latin. She also enjoys cooking, stand-up comedy, and is an avid gamer, having achieved level 40 on her Steam profile.