Caseville started as Port Elizabeth

Before the cheeseburgers and the parrot-head crowds, Caseville was a sawmill at the mouth of a river, and it didn’t have its name yet. The first settler was Reuben Dodge, who came up from Maine in 1840 and built a cabin on the Pigeon River where it empties into Saginaw Bay, then lived off hunting, fishing, and a little farming. For a dozen years that was about all there was.

Things changed in 1852, when a man named William Rattle showed up representing a Cleveland businessman, Leonard Case, who had bought up some 20,000 acres around here. Rattle put up a sawmill, and the little settlement that gathered around it got named Port Elizabeth, after his wife. That name didn’t outlast the decade. By 1856 the town was Caseville, after the Cleveland landowner whose money was behind it — a man who, as far as the records show, may never have set foot in the place that carries his name.

The bones of that early town are still the bones of today’s. The mouth of the Pigeon River is still the heart of it, only now it’s a harbor full of pleasure boats instead of lumber schooners. The bay that floated white pine out to market now draws people in for the beach and the perch fishing.

It’s a common Thumb pattern — a lumber baron’s land deal becomes a mill, the mill becomes a town, the timber runs out, and the town finds a second life. Caseville’s second life just happens to involve a ten-day festival named for a Jimmy Buffett song.