The village that went from Hall's Corners to Farmers to Carsonville

A crossroads in east-central Sanilac County couldn’t make up its mind what to call itself. It started in 1853, when Silas Hall built a log store at the corners, and people did the obvious thing and called the spot Hall’s Corners. Then the post office arrived in 1857 with its own idea, and for a few years the mail came addressed to a place called Farmers — which, fair enough, is exactly what lived out there.

The name that finally stuck belonged to a newcomer. Arthur Carson moved up from Black River in 1864 and went into business hard: a hotel, then a store, then a bigger store in 1872, then a grain elevator in 1880. When you own that much of a small town, the town tends to take your name, and by the time it incorporated as a village in 1887 it was Carsonville. The village sits right on the township line, split between Bridgehampton and Washington, so a Carsonville address can technically land in either one.

The Pere Marquette railroad ran a line through on its way between Saginaw and Port Huron, and for a stretch Carsonville hummed — the Carson House hotel, a livery stable, a cheese factory, a newspaper a schoolteacher named Uri Raymond ran on the side called the Bark Shanty News. Then in 1911 a fire ripped through and took out an entire block of downtown. A lot of the burned-out businesses simply moved away rather than rebuild, and the village never got that block back. Drive through today and it’s a quiet farm town, the kind people now call one of the Thumb’s lost towns — but it’s still here, still on the map under the third name it tried, which is more than a lot of crossroads can say.