Columbiaville was Niverville first — and a lumber baron made trains stop here

A merchant once wrote into a deed that every passenger train passing through Columbiaville had to stop — and the railroad agreed. That’s the kind of place this is: a Flint River sawmill village in the northwest corner of Lapeer County where one ambitious man bent the rules of a railroad to his front door.

It started smaller, and under a different name. Levi Cutting put up the first house on the site in 1848, the same year George and Henry Niver built a sawmill on the riverbank, and the settlement that gathered around the saw took the natural name: Niverville. That lasted until 1857, when the village applied for a post office and learned there was already a Niverville in Michigan. The Niver brothers picked the replacement — Columbiaville, after Columbia County, New York, the county they’d come from — and it has stuck for more than a century and a half.

The man who really built the town was William Peter. He opened the village’s first store in 1852, in a two-story building at Lapeer and Middle streets, then grew rich as the white pine of northern Lapeer County came down around him, milling lumber and flour. When the railroad finally reached town, Peter put up a handsome brick depot in 1893 — and slipped that train-stop clause into the deed so no train could roll past the place he’d made. He built himself a mansion to match.

The whole shape of Columbiaville — the name on the welcome sign, the old brick depot, the big house in town — comes down to a sawmill on a riverbank and one merchant who didn’t like being passed by.