Old Conoly community near Excel was once a bustling stop on the Manistee & Repton Railroad

Old bell at Excel Baptist Church.

If you’ve ever traveled down State Highway 136 West between Excel and Ollie, you’ve passed through what was once known as the Conoly community. Old maps show “downtown” Conoly as being located near the present-day intersection of Highway 136 and Garnder Road, a little over two miles from downtown Excel.

Largely forgotten today, Conoly was once a thriving stop on the Manistee & Repton Railroad in the early 1900s. Train time tables from that time show that Conoly was the rail stop between Dottelle and Shiverville, and the Conoly stop was known for having its own telephone office as far back as 1912. On the slow-moving trains of the era, Conoly was s 10-minute train ride from Dottelle and a one-hour ride to Manistee.

Records also reflect that there were enough people living at Conoly in the early 1900s to support its own post office. While records are unclear as to how long the post office existed, it is known that there was a Conoly post office as far back as 1905. More than likely it was located at the train depot or in a small community store.

The community apparently took its name from a man named McLean Conoly, who owned a sizeable turpentine distillery in that area. In the Dec. 10, 1903 edition of The Monroe Journal, editor Q. Salter reported that he’d visited Conoly distillery and “observed quite a lot of turpentine and rosin in barrels” that amounted to 150 barrels of “spirits of turpentine” and 500 barrels of rosin ready for shipment. Conoly “is the owner of several large tracts of well-timbered pine lands in this county and is one of the most successful and skillful turpentine men in the state,” Salter wrote.

As time went on, Conoly apparently experienced some financial reverses and his mill changed hands. In 1908, the property was known as the Excel Turpentine Co. and was in the business of selling sawn pine shingles, shipped by rail directly from Conoly. A man named J.W. Brown entered the picture around that same time, and Conoly was the headquarters for his naval stores manufacturing business. “Naval stores” was a catch-all phrase from that time period used to describe various products from pine trees, including resin, pitch and turpentine, which were all used in building and maintaining wooden ships.

Interesting fact about Brown is that he and an Excel resident named M.F. Knight were responsible for a landmark that can still be seen in Excel today. According to the Feb. 4, 1909 edition of The Journal, the “members of the Excel Baptist Church and community at large are sincerely grateful to (Brown and Knight) for presenting the church a large and excellent bell in January. A resolution of thanks was also passed by the church and embodied in the minutes.” This same bell can still be seen today, mounted on a brick base outside the Excel Baptist Church on Highway 136 East.

In the end, despite my best efforts I was unable to determine what ultimately became of McLean Conoly. A search of available cemetery records revealed no burial site for this early Monroe County businessman, who apparently left the state after his financial troubles. If anyone in the reading audience has any additional information about the Conoly community or McLean Conoly please let me know.