Clarksville: a town named off a storekeeper's first name

Clarksville is named after a man’s first name, not his last. In 1875, Clark L. Howard put up a store at the corners where sections 3 and 10 meet in Campbell Township and wasted no time landing a post office to go with it. When the post office needed a name, he reached for his own — Clark — and the place became Clarksville. Most Michigan towns ending in “-ville” carry somebody’s surname; this one quietly broke the pattern.

The township around it was even younger to settlement than that suggests. Campbell Township took shape in 1840, named for two Irish brothers, Jeremiah and Martin Campbell, who for a stretch were the only family living in a stretch of swampy, roadless lowland reached mainly by water up Duck Creek. Settlers didn’t really arrive until the late 1840s, once the land was surveyed and roads were cut. So when Howard opened his store in 1875, he was setting up shop in country that had been hard to get to within living memory.

The store did what a country store and post office tended to do: it became the seed of a village. Within a couple of decades Clarksville had a church, two doctors, a grange hall, a wagon shop, a couple of one-room schools, and several more stores clustered at the crossroads. The Pere Marquette railroad ran a line through, and freight still rolls through town on those tracks today.

It’s a small thing, a name, but it tells you who mattered at a crossroads in 1875. The man with the store and the postmark got the town named after him — and he picked the friendliest version of it, the one his neighbors would have called him by.