Alcona was first called Negwegon, and the new name was invented

The name on the courthouse in Harrisville is made up — and not in the way most place names are. When the Michigan legislature carved this county out in 1840, it called it Negwegon County. The name honored a Chippewa leader also known as Little Wing, remembered as an American ally against the British in the War of 1812. That name lasted three years.

In 1843 lawmakers swapped it for Alcona — a word no one had ever spoken before someone wrote it down. It came from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a federal Indian agent and geographer who spent years in Michigan. He had an odd hobby: he invented county names. He would glue together scraps of Ojibwe, Latin, Arabic, and Greek into something that sounded Native but wasn’t. Alcona was his word for “a fine or excellent plain.” He pulled the same trick on a string of neighbors — Alpena, Iosco, Oscoda, Tuscola. So a whole stretch of the northern Lower Peninsula carries names that exist nowhere else on earth, because Schoolcraft made them up.

For its first decades the county was a county in name only. Almost no one lived here, so it was tied to bigger neighbors for taxes and courts — to Mackinac first, then Cheboygan, Alpena, and Iosco in turn. It didn’t stand up its own government until 1869, when Harrisville became the seat. By then the lumber camps were filling in, and the invented name had stuck.

So when you see “Alcona” on a road sign, you’re reading a 19th-century word puzzle — one that outlived both the chief it replaced and the man who built it.