How Davisville became Croswell

Croswell got its name the way a lot of Michigan towns did in the 1870s: somebody in charge of naming the railroad stop looked around for an important name to borrow, and grabbed the governor’s. The settlement had started in 1845 along the Black River, and for a while it went by exactly that — Black River. Then it picked up the name Davisville, after its first postmaster, and that’s what it was when the Port Huron & Northwestern Railroad came through.

The railroad’s arrival was the moment everything got renamed, and in 1877 Davisville became Croswell, in honor of Charles Miller Croswell. He wasn’t a local hero or a founding settler. He was simply Michigan’s seventeenth governor, sitting in Lansing at the exact time the town needed a name with some weight to it. The new name stuck, and the place incorporated as a city in 1881, just as Croswell himself was finishing his term.

It’s a quietly funny thing to think about — a working farm town on the Black River carrying the name of a man who, as far as anyone can tell, had little to do with it beyond holding statewide office in the right year. The town has more than earned the name since. It became sugar-beet country, threw a swinging footbridge across the Black River in 1905, and has run its own county fair for generations. But the name itself is a small fossil of how naming worked back then: a governor’s surname, lifted off a Lansing letterhead and bolted onto a depot sign in the Thumb, where it’s stayed for nearly 150 years.