Emmett, the Irish corner of St. Clair County

The name gives it away. Emmett — township and village both — was christened for Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot hanged for treason against the British crown in 1803. The farmers who chose that name meant it. They were Irish Catholics who came inland from the lake in the years around 1850, many of them fleeing the famine, and they wanted their new ground in St. Clair County to carry a piece of home. (The American spelling quietly grew a second “t” along the way.)

The church came almost before the crops. Father Lawrence Kilroy, a pioneer priest who planted parishes all across the county, set up a cemetery and a mission a couple of miles east of the present village around 1851, in Kenockee Township, and a log church followed in 1853 to serve a congregation that was nearly all Irish. As the families multiplied, a frame church went up in 1865 for about $2,000, and in 1897 the parish built a tall Neo-Gothic brick church right in Emmett — the kind with a steeple you could see across the flat farm country for miles.

That 1897 church burned in 1966, and the parish — Our Lady of Mount Carmel — rebuilt in the plainer style of the day, finishing the present building in 1970. The Irish kept their other institutions too: in 1876 the men of the area formed the St. Patrick’s Benevolent Society to pass the hat for neighbors who’d fallen on hard times.

Drive the county roads around Emmett and the Irish names still run down the mailboxes and the old headstones in the Mount Carmel cemetery — Kennedy, Farrell, and the rest. It’s one of those Michigan towns where you can read the whole settlement story off a single word painted on the township sign.