How Quincy got its name

A homesick settler is the reason there is a Quincy in southern Michigan at all. In the early 1830s a cluster of cabins had gone up along the old Chicago Road — the stage route that ran from Detroit out to Chicago, the highway of its day — and the place needed a name. A man who had come west from Quincy, Massachusetts, put his old hometown forward, and it stuck. The post office opened under that name on December 16, 1836, which is the closest thing the village has to a birth certificate.

So a New England name rode three hundred miles inland and settled into Branch County farm country. The Massachusetts Quincy carries some weight of its own — it took its name from a colonial-era family and is the birthplace of two presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. None of that history walked the Chicago Road with the settler. He just wanted the name of home, and now every road sign on the south side of the county quietly repeats it.

The village grew the way these Chicago Road towns did, strung along a main street, and the railroad later in the century gave it a second wind as a trading center for the surrounding farms. But the name was set first, decades before the tracks arrived.

That is the funny thing about a town name. It outlasts almost everyone who voted on it, and it keeps a record nobody set out to keep — in this case, one man’s memory of a place back east, made permanent because the post office needed something to write on the door.