Evart carries one pioneer's name — minus a letter

A whole town runs on a name that lost a letter. Evart sits on the west bank of the Muskegon River, and it was named for Frank Evart, one of the first settlers to take up land here — a Civil War veteran who got the honor when the place needed a name in the early 1870s. The catch is that most tellings say his family name was actually Everts, and somewhere between the man and the map a letter fell off. By the time the post office opened, the shorter spelling was official, and nobody ever fixed it.

The town itself was laid out around 1871 and 1872, on land tied to two of the big names in this corner of the state: Delos Blodgett and James Kennedy, lumbermen who knew exactly why a town belonged right here. The Muskegon was the highway. Crews upstream felled white pine all winter, rolled the logs onto the ice, and let the spring flood carry millions of board feet down past Evart to the mills. People around here used to call this whole region the land of green gold, and the green gold floated by the front porch every spring.

The river still bends through the middle of town, only now it carries canoes and smallmouth instead of saw logs. Evart kept the lumber-era street grid and a handful of the old brick storefronts, and every July it fills up with hammered-dulcimer players from all over the country — a long way from a logging camp, but the same Muskegon running past.

The name is the part that sticks with people. Stand on the river bridge and you’re in a town that has spent more than 150 years answering to a typo, named for a man whose own headstone spells it the other way.