A dozen free turkeys became Turkeyville

Wayne Cornwell wanted to be a dairy farmer. He married Marjorie in 1943, bought some cows, and watched them get sick in a bad year — and that should have been the end of the story. Instead a sympathetic neighbor handed him twelve turkeys to try, and every one of them lived. That dozen birds, raised on a farm in the rolling country north of Marshall, is the whole origin of the place a million Michiganders now know as Turkeyville.

It grew the slow way, by sandwich. In the early 1960s the Cornwells joined a church group selling turkey sandwiches at the county fair, and word got around about Grandma’s cooking. By 1968 they opened a one-room eatery on the farm, just a counter and a couple of stools, expecting maybe to feed the neighbors. People kept coming for the open-faced turkey dinner — real roasted bird, mashed potatoes, the works — and the one room became a restaurant, then a bakery, then an ice cream parlor churning its own flavors.

In the fall of 1987 they added the part that made it a destination instead of a meal: Cornwell’s Dinner Theatre, a proper stage where you eat turkey and then watch a musical. Now the place sprawls — gift shop, campground, country store, a calendar of festivals — and it’s still run by the family that started it, still anchored to that original farmhouse. The thing to order is the same thing that built it: the hot turkey dinner, the kind your grandmother made if your grandmother happened to raise her own birds. Not bad for twelve turkeys nobody else wanted.