Arenac: a county name a man invented from Latin and Ojibwe

The name “Arenac” sounds like it ought to come from an old Ojibwe word for the place — most Michigan county names do, or else honor some governor or war hero. This one is stranger. A man made it up.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was a 19th-century explorer, Indian agent, and amateur word-coiner who spent years in Michigan and developed a hobby of inventing county names by splicing pieces of different languages together. He gave us several of them, and they trip up people trying to guess their roots, because no single language will explain them. Arenac is pure Schoolcraft: he took the Latin word “arena,” which means sand, and bolted on “ac,” an ending he borrowed from Ojibwe to mean “place of.” Put together, he meant it to read as a sandy place for good footing — a fair description of this low, sandy country along Saginaw Bay.

If “arena” meaning sand seems odd, it’s worth remembering where the English word for a stadium comes from. Roman arenas were spread with sand to soak up the blood of the games, and that sand was the “arena.” Schoolcraft, a classically educated man, was reaching all the way back to that.

The county that wears the name was set off and organized in 1883, carved from the northern townships of Bay County. By then the made-up word had been sitting on the map for decades, waiting for a county to attach itself to.

So the next time someone tries to tell you what “Arenac” means in the old language, you can gently set them straight: it doesn’t mean anything in any single language. It’s a scholar’s invention, half Rome and half Ojibwe, describing the sand under your feet.