Clawson is probably just 'Lawson' spelled wrong

A whole city may be named after a typo. When the post office opened here on August 16, 1880, the paperwork came back reading “Clawson.” The best guess anyone has is that it was meant to honor a local man named Lawson, with an extra letter slipped in somewhere between the town and Washington. The name stuck, and nobody bothered to fix it.

The man usually credited is John C. Lawson, an early settler. The popular story says he was lined up to be the first postmaster. But the tidy version falls apart on a closer look: the records suggest he never actually held the job. Another tale points to a Clyde Lawson, which can’t be right — Clyde wasn’t born until 1882, two years after the name was already on the map. The honest answer is that the exact person is lost. Only the misspelling is real, and it’s permanent.

Before any of that, the crossroads had two plainer names. Settlers had been here since 1829, and they called the spot “Pumachug” and, more simply, “The Corners.” Those are the kind of names you give a place that’s barely a place yet, where two farm roads happen to cross.

Clawson grew up slowly between Detroit and Pontiac, and in time it leaned into being small. The city motto is “The Little City with the Big Heart” — the sort of thing a town says when it’s ringed by bigger suburbs and perfectly happy about it.

So the name on the water tower is, most likely, a clerk’s slip of the pen. It outlasted everyone who could have fixed it — including the man it was supposed to honor.