Goodrich grew up around a creek somebody dammed in 1846

The pretty pond in the middle of Goodrich is really just a creek that got stopped. Kearsley Creek runs through the southeast corner of Genesee County, and in the 1840s a handful of settlers cleared land on its banks and threw up a dam to power a mill. The four-story E & R Mills building went up between 1844 and 1846, raceway and fixtures and all, for the sum of $8,500 — and the water it backed up became the Goodrich Mill Pond.

The brothers who started the village were Moses and Enos Goodrich, who came west from New York and landed in the county in 1835. They built and farmed and named the place, and the pond their neighbors’ mill created turned into the heart of it. A grist mill in a frontier town wasn’t just industry; it was the reason a town existed at all, the spot where farmers for miles around brought wheat to be ground and stayed to swap news. So the pond sat at the literal and social center of Goodrich from the start.

It still does, just for gentler reasons. The mill is long gone, but the dammed water stayed, and for generations the pond has been where the village fishes in summer, paddles a boat around on a warm evening, and laces up skates when it freezes hard in January. Drive into Goodrich today and the old mill pond is the thing you notice first — a stretch of quiet water in the middle of town, holding the shape of a decision somebody made with a shovel and a creek almost 180 years ago.