Clinton's woolen mill ran for 90 years on the old Chicago Road

A hundred Clinton-area men put their own money into wool in 1866, and the bet paid off for the next ninety years. The Clinton Woolen Mills they organized took the fleece coming off Lenawee County’s sheep, washed it, spun it, and wove it into cloth — a whole farm-to-fabric business running on the River Raisin. A four-story brick mill rose to do the work, and the town arranged itself around the shifts.

Fire took the original building in 1886, the way fire took so many nineteenth-century mills packed with grease and dry wool. Clinton barely paused — the mill was rebuilt and the looms went back to running, and they kept running until 1957. By then it had clothed nine decades of Michiganders and outlasted most of the woolen mills that once dotted the state.

Clinton existed in the first place because of a road. When Congress paid to survey a military road from Detroit to Chicago in 1825, the surveyors swung the route a few miles south of the old Sauk Trail, and that bend carried the road straight into this corner of Lenawee County where it crossed the River Raisin. Settlers from New York, who had come west on the Erie Canal, named their new village for DeWitt Clinton — the governor back home who had championed that very canal. A road and a canal, both, folded into one little town’s name.

The Chicago Road is US-12 now, and traffic mostly hurries through. But the mill buildings and the tight old downtown are still there, marking the spot where a wagon road, a canal governor’s name, and a county’s worth of sheep all came together.