Georgetown was George's mill town before it was Jenison's

The township is named for a George, but the town inside it is named for someone else entirely. When settlers reached this bend of the Grand River in the 1830s, George Ketchum showed up around 1837 and built the first sawmills on Rush Creek. People started calling the place George’s Town, and when the township organized in 1840, the name stuck in its tidied-up form: Georgetown.

The Jenison family got here first, though. Hiram Jenison and his relatives arrived in 1834 and went to work cutting the white pine and hardwood, and by 1838 they owned 1,600 acres along Rush Creek south of the river. Hiram was elected the township’s first supervisor in 1840 by a grand total of seven voters. The Jenisons did more than log — they donated land for roads, schools, and churches, and the twins Luman and Lucius ran the milling business as partners for decades, both dying in 1899.

So the name landed in a funny place. The township carries George Ketchum’s mill nickname, but the community that grew up at the heart of it took the family name instead and became Jenison. Hiram had built another lumber mill in 1864, and the village that spread out around the Jenison mills eventually swallowed the small-town feel and turned suburban as Grand Rapids crept west.

Today Georgetown is a busy, populous township, a stretch of subdivisions and strip malls where the white pine used to stand. The Jenison name is everywhere — on the schools, the streets, the historical association that keeps the family’s story — while the George who actually named the township gets remembered mostly by people who go looking.