Ionia and Lansing Railroad Ionia and Lansing Railroad The Ionia and Lansing Rail Road is a defunct railroad which operated in the state of Michigan in the 1860s and 1870s. The company incorporated on November 13, 1865; the investors hailed primarily from Lansing, Ionia and Portland. The original charter called for a from Ionia to Lansing; on January 13, 1869 this was amended with a much grander vision: a line from Lansing to the mouth of the Pentwater River at Pentwater, on the shores of Lake Michigan. In late 1869 the I&L opened a line between Lansing and Ionia; the first trains ran in
Robert Lansing , Lansing backed Woodrow Wilson in issuing three notes of protest to the German government. William Jennings Bryan resigned as Secretary of State following Wilson's second note, which Bryan considered too belligerent. Lansing replaced Bryan, and said in his memoirs that following the "Lusitania" tragedy he always had the "conviction that we would ultimately become the ally of Britain". In 1916 Lansing hired a handful of men who became the State Department's first special agents in the new Bureau of Secret Intelligence. These agents were initially used to observe the activities of the Central Powers in America, and later to