Edenville: named for the Garden of Eden (really)

Plenty of Michigan towns are named for founders, railroads, or far-off cities. Edenville is named for paradise. In the lumber days the settlement at the meeting of the Tittabawassee and Tobacco rivers was known simply as “Camp 16.” When a post office arrived in 1869 and storekeeper-postmaster Mr. Church was asked for a proper name, the township’s own history says he looked out over the two rivers coming together and decided it looked like the Garden of Eden. Edenville it has been ever since.

The township grew up on white pine — log drives, river camps, and the families who stayed on to farm after the timber was gone. In the 1920s a dam on the rivers created Wixom Lake, and lake life gradually became the township’s second identity, with cottages spreading up the Tobacco arm along M-30. It’s a place that has reinvented itself before, which is worth remembering as the lake era gears up for its own second act.