Camden got its name out of a hat

Some towns agonize over their names for years. Camden settled it the way you’d settle who buys the next round — by drawing slips from a hat. The little settlement near the Ohio line started life around sawmills in 1837, when Easton Chester and his sons cut in along the creek, and its first post office opened that August under the name Cranbrook.

Cranbrook didn’t stick. When it came time to make the name official a few years on, the founders dropped a handful of suggestions into a hat and pulled one out, and the winning slip read Camden — the name Easton Chester had thrown in after his old hometown of Camden, New York. The post office changed over to Camden in 1840, and that random little draw has been the town’s name for nearly two centuries since.

The village kept moving even after that. The streets of the present site were platted in 1867, and around 1870 the whole settlement picked up and shifted south to where it sits today, incorporating as a village in 1899. It’s farm country down here in the southern tier of Hillsdale County, the last stretch of Michigan before the road crosses into Ohio, and Camden has stayed the kind of small that makes a name-drawn-from-a-hat story feel exactly right.

There’s something honest about it. A lot of Michigan places carry grand names borrowed from ancient cities or stuck on by a railroad surveyor who never lived there. Camden just admits it: somebody reached into a hat one day, pulled out a slip, and that was that.