Barryton: a lumberman platted a town and put his own name on it

Frank Barry came to this part of Mecosta County around 1884 to cut timber out by Round Lake, and a decade later he did what a confident lumberman could do: he laid out a whole town and named it after himself. In 1894 he and his wife Marion registered the plat for Barryton with the state, dropping a new village onto farmland in Fork Township, right where the two branches of the Chippewa River come together.

It filled in fast. Within two years Barryton had a sawmill and a planing mill turning out lumber, plus a livery, two general stores, two hotels, two restaurants, a pharmacy, and a hardware store — a real downtown, conjured almost overnight from a stand of pine. A daily stage and, soon, the Pere Marquette Railroad connected it to the wider world. By the turn of the century the place counted around five hundred people, and in 1908 it incorporated as a village.

The engine under all of it was the same one driving half of Michigan in those years: white pine. Logs floated down the Chippewa toward the mills, and once a rail spur reached Barryton, sawn lumber rolled out by the carload. It was a classic Michigan boomtown arc — timber money builds a brisk little business district in a few short seasons.

The pine, of course, did not last forever, and Barryton settled into the smaller farming-and-lake town it remains. But the name still does its quiet job every day. Every letter addressed to Barryton, every road sign on the way in, still carries the surname of the man who decided, in 1894, that this fork in the river ought to be a town with his name on the front of it.