DeWitt's river was named 'see yourself'

The river curling through downtown DeWitt has one of the prettiest names in Michigan, and it’s a translation. The Ojibwe called it Wabwaysin — roughly, “see yourself” — because the water ran clear and still enough to throw back a perfect reflection of the trees leaning over it, and of whoever leaned over to look. English-speaking settlers kept the idea and called it the Looking Glass.

A looking glass is just an old word for a mirror, and the name fits a river that has no dams across its 70-odd miles before it empties into the Grand. Slow, glassy, lined with wetlands and woodlots — it still does the thing it was named for on a calm morning.

DeWitt grew up right on its bank. Captain David Scott came over from Ann Arbor in 1833, built a home by the river, and laid out the town; the first township meeting was held in his house in the spring of 1836. For a stretch DeWitt was the county seat, before that honor moved up the road to St. Johns in 1857. The town’s name has nothing to do with the river, though — it honors DeWitt Clinton, the New York governor who pushed through the Erie Canal, the same man Clinton County is named for.

There was a Chippewa village called Wabwahnahseepee just north of where DeWitt sits now, back when the first settlers arrived — close kin to the river’s old name, and a reminder that people were reading their faces in this water long before anyone platted a town beside it. Drop a kayak in today below the riverfront park and you’ll see what the Ojibwe saw: sky, branches, and your own face, sliding along underneath you.