Akron made cheese boxes before it made much else

The township came almost thirty years before the town. Settlers were clearing land here by the mid-1850s — Charles Beach and his family arrived in March 1854, when the place was still unbroken woods, and Akron Township was organized at the end of 1855, with the first meeting held at Alvin Waldo’s house the next spring. For a generation it was farms and not much else, raising wheat and corn and hay on land that had been pine.

Then the railroad showed up and made a town overnight. The Saginaw, Tuscola & Huron line came through, and in the spring of 1882 a man named G. W. Crane put up the first store. That same year Samuel Lynn platted the village of Akron right along the tracks. Out of nowhere there was a place to ship from and a place to buy from.

What’s telling is what got built there: sawmills, to cut the timber still standing, and a cheese-box factory. The boxes weren’t a side note — they were a window into what the country around Akron was becoming. The Thumb’s cleared land turned to dairy as much as grain, and dairy meant cheese, and cheese meant somebody had to make the round wooden boxes it shipped in. A cheese-box factory next to a railroad is a small machine for turning local milk into money in Detroit.

That’s the quiet pattern of a lot of Thumb towns. The first chapter is a settler with an axe and a wagon. The second chapter is a railroad surveyor deciding the line will cross right here, and a village appearing within a year or two, complete with a mill and whatever small factory the local farms could feed. Akron’s factory made boxes for cheese; another town’s made barrel staves or pickles. The tracks are mostly quiet now, but the village they conjured up in 1882 is still standing where they put it.