Quincy borrowed its name from Massachusetts

Quincy began with a log cabin built by Horace Wilson in 1830, along the route that became the Chicago Road and later U.S. 12. When the new community split from Coldwater Township in 1836, Dr. Hiram Allen suggested naming it after his hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts. The name stuck.

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 Chicago Road towns did, strung along the route and serving the farms around it. The railroad later gave Quincy another connection to the rest of southern Michigan, but the name was already in place.

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.