Almont was Newburg first — and is named for a Mexican general

A small farm village in southeast Lapeer County is named after a Mexican general, and the village will tell you the exact day it happened: January 5, 1846. That’s when Almont stopped being Newburg.

The town is older than that name. In 1833 — three years before Michigan was even a state — Daniel Black bought land here from the federal government for $1.25 an acre and put up the first log house on what’s now Main Street. The settlement that grew around him was platted as Newburg, a plain enough frontier name.

Then, in 1846, the village reached past plain. It took the name Almont in honor of Juan V. Almonte — a Mexican general, diplomat, and ambassador who was a well-known figure in the United States in those years, the era of Texas and the run-up to the Mexican-American War. The final “e” wore off somewhere between the man and the sign. It’s a genuinely odd thing for a Michigan farm town to carry the name of a Mexican statesman, and yet there it is, on every piece of mail in town.

Almont calls itself the sixth-oldest village in Michigan, founded in 1833 — a boast that’s really just a measure of how early settlers reached this gently rolling, fertile country near the Oakland County line. The name on your mailbox traces to a single January day and to a man almost no one in town could pick out of a history book.