How Dickinson County got its name

Michigan’s county map got its last addition on May 21, 1891. That is when Dickinson County says the state created the county from parts of Iron, Marquette, and Menominee counties. The Library of Michigan calls Dickinson the “youngest” of Michigan’s 83 counties and traces its organization to Public Act 89 of 1891.

Iron explains why the county formed when it did. The county’s history dates John Lane Buell’s major ore discovery to 1873, followed by mines at Waucedah, Vulcan, Norway, Quinnesec, and Metropolitan and a railroad pushed across the Menominee Range. By 1891, Iron Mountain had become the range’s center of commerce and distribution, so it became the county seat. The courthouse and jail followed in 1896 and 1897; the National Park Service lists the Romanesque complex in the National Register of Historic Places.

The name itself did not come from a mine or a local settlement. It honors Donald M. Dickinson, whom the county describes as a prominent Detroit attorney and Postmaster General in President Grover Cleveland’s first administration. So Michigan’s youngest county carries the name of a downstate public figure, while its reason for becoming a county was rooted firmly in the Upper Peninsula’s iron range.