Two brothers from Canada, and the county's first Catholic church

Two brothers crossed over from Canada in 1860 and one of them gave a Thumb village its name. Joseph and James Gage came down into Tuscola County, and Joseph filed a homestead claim in Elmwood Township. In 1869 he built a store and a mill on his land, and two years after that he laid out a village where five roads happened to come together. He called it Gagetown, after himself — a modest enough monument for a man who built the place from scratch.

What made Gagetown grow was the same thing that made half the Thumb grow: the railroad. In 1882 the Pontiac, Oxford and Northern reached the village, hauling in daily mail and passengers, and Gagetown incorporated that very year. For a stretch in the late 1800s it boomed, a busy little crossroads shipping out the lumber and grain of the surrounding farms.

The town also holds a quieter first. In 1879 Father Clement Krebs organized St. Agatha’s parish in Gagetown — the first Catholic church in all of Tuscola County. In a region settled heavily by German and Irish and French-Canadian farmers, that made the village an early anchor of Catholic life in the Thumb, a generation before many of its neighbors had a church of their own.

Today Gagetown is small and easy to drive through without noticing. But the bones of the story are still there in the way the roads meet and the church stands. A Canadian homesteader picked a spot where five roads crossed, put up a mill, named it for his family, and waited for the train — and the place that grew became the county’s first Catholic ground. Not bad for a claim filed by a man who’d been in the country barely a decade.