Coleman, named for the man who drew it on a map

In 1868 a man named Seymour Coleman bought a thousand acres of timber land out here from the lumberman Ammi W. Wright, surveyed a chunk of it, and laid out a village on paper. He put his own name on it, and it stuck. That is the whole origin story of Coleman: one buyer, one plat, one name that outlived everybody who argued about it.

What turned the plat into a town was the railroad. The Pere Marquette pushed its line through this corner of northwest Midland County in 1870, and the very first settler, Jonathan Pierce, is said to have ridden in on the construction train itself. A sawmill went up that same year. A depot opened the next. After that the pine did the talking.

For about two decades, 1870 to 1890, this was a roaring lumber town. People who lived through it counted as many as twenty or thirty sawmills running at once, three banks, a row of mercantile stores and hotels, and — by one local tally — around twenty saloons to keep the mill hands occupied after dark. The white pine that built half the Midwest rolled out of places exactly like this, twelve-foot logs at a time, until the big timber was simply gone.

When the forests thinned, Coleman did what a lot of Michigan mill towns did: it settled down and stayed put. The village incorporated in 1887 and became a fourth-class city in 1905, then a home-rule city in 1969. Today it sits about twenty miles up the road from Midland, a small grid of streets where the saws once never stopped — the rare town that still wears, plainly, the name of the man who first sketched it out of the woods.