Birch Run: a creek of birch trees, and a depot that made the town

Birch Run is named for exactly what it sounds like: a creek lined with white birch trees, a “run” being an old word for a small stream. The trees gave the water its name and the water gave the settlement its own, which is about as honest as a place name gets.

The town that grew up there was a railroad town from the start. A station went in along the line in the 1850s, and the first postmaster, John Moore, got things going. Once the trains stopped, Birch Run had a reason to exist — by 1900 it was a shipping point sending out grain and lumber from the farms and woods around it. Later the Saginaw and Flint interurban came through, the electric streetcar line that briefly tied the small towns of mid-Michigan together and let a farmer ride into the city without hitching up a horse.

There’s a wrinkle in the name, too. For five years the place wasn’t Birch Run at all. In 1863 it was renamed Deer Lick — presumably for a spot where deer came to lick salt — and it stayed Deer Lick until 1868, when somebody thought better of it and switched back to Birch Run. The birch creek won.

These days the name carries farther than the creek ever did, mostly because of the enormous outlet mall that draws shoppers off I-75 by the busload. But the older Birch Run is still there underneath — the depot town, the grain shipments, the streetcar line, and a stream that was once thick enough with birch to name a whole community.