Ferrysburg: the town the Ferry sons platted at the river's mouth

In October 1834, a Presbyterian missionary named William Montague Ferry stepped off the lake and onto the banks of the Grand River with his family. He’d spent years running a mission on Mackinac Island; now he looked at the timber crowding the river’s mouth and saw a future. Within a year the Ferrys were living in a log cabin in a new settlement they called Grand Haven, and Ferry was busy turning pine into money through the Grand Haven Company.

He is remembered as the father of Grand Haven, and the man did not raise idle children. On the north side of the river, on January 26, 1857, two of his sons — William M. Ferry, Jr. and Thomas White Ferry — laid out a village of their own and stamped the family name on it. Ferrysburg has carried it ever since.

The sons made their own marks well beyond the plat map. Thomas White Ferry went all the way to Washington, serving Michigan in both the U.S. House and Senate, and as president pro tempore he presided over the Senate during a stretch when the country had no sitting vice president. For a window of national crisis, a man from a little river town near Lake Michigan was a heartbeat from the presidency.

The setting explains the family’s whole gamble. Ferrysburg sits on the north bank where the Grand River meets the lake, with Spring Lake forming part of its southern edge — a natural harbor for shipping out lumber when white pine was the region’s gold. The mills are long gone, but the geography that drew the Ferrys is unchanged.

The town is small and easy to drive through without noticing the name. But it’s a fossil of how Michigan got settled: a missionary, a river, a stand of pine, and a family that planted itself at the water and never quite left.