Argentine: the Genesee village named for silver

A village in the southwest corner of Genesee County is named, more or less, for silver. “Argentine” comes from the same Latin root as the chemical symbol for silver, and the name has the ring of a mining town — though the riches here were never quite that. The place started out as something far plainer: when the first post office opened in 1837 it went by “Booton,” and only in 1842 did it trade up for the shinier name, after settlers learned another Michigan town had grabbed “Booton” first.

The man behind it was James Murray, who came to the area around 1836 to build a mill and ended up as the first postmaster, the one who picked the new name. His mill is the part of the story that refuses to end. It changed hands across the generations — one owner lost it during the Great Depression, the Wolcott family ran it for decades after — and it stayed a working mill right up until the family finally sold it to Argentine Township in 1993. Most frontier mills were gone within a lifetime; this one outlasted nearly everything around it.

Water shaped the rest. Just east of the village, settlers dammed North Ore Creek and backed it up into Lobdell Lake, named for William Lobdell, who arrived with Murray in 1836. The creek’s name is a small clue to what people once hoped to find in the ground here. Today Argentine is mostly lakes and quiet roads, a township where the grandest thing about it might be the name — a frontier settlement that decided, almost two centuries ago, to sound like silver.