How Dickinson County got its name

Here’s a piece of trivia to win a bar bet with: Michigan finished drawing its county map on May 21, 1891. That’s the day the legislature created Dickinson County — the 83rd and final county, carved from corners of Marquette, Menominee, and Iron counties — and no county has been made or unmade since. Dickinson has been “Michigan’s newest county” for more than 130 years now, and it wears the title proudly.

Iron made it happen. After John Lane Buell exposed one of the richest iron deposits anywhere in 1873, the Menominee Range boomed — mines at Waucedah, Vulcan, Norway, and Quinnesec, the railroad pushing through, and Iron Mountain rising as the range’s center of commerce with some of the largest iron mines in the state. A booming region a long way from anyone else’s courthouse made its case, and in 1891 it got a county of its own, with Iron Mountain as the seat. The handsome Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse that followed in 1896-97, all rock-faced brick trimmed with Lake Superior sandstone, still presides over town today.

As for the name: Donald M. Dickinson was a Detroit lawyer who argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, organized Michigan’s Democratic Party in an era when that was uphill work, and served as U.S. Postmaster General under President Grover Cleveland in 1888 and 1889. He was no Upper Peninsula man — his fame was all downstate and national — but in 1891 his was one of the biggest names in Michigan, and the state’s last new county took it. Dickinson lived until 1917, plenty long enough to see the county that carries his name thrive.