A week by canoe to Dick's Forks: the county's first settler

In September 1861, Marvel Secord and his family ran out of road. They had come by wagon to St. Charles, by the steamer Little Nell to Saginaw, and by another steamer up to Midland — and that was as far as machinery could take them. From Midland they hired two Native guides and pushed the rest of the way by canoe: a week of hard paddling up the Tittabawassee River, more than thirty miles into country that had no settlers in it yet.

They landed at a spot called Dick’s Forks, where the Sugar River meets the Tittabawassee. The odd name came from a surveyor’s mark — a man named Dixon had once held the land, and someone had cut his name into a tree. Secord claimed his homestead there in 1863 and lived on it the rest of his life. He was, by every local account, the first person to settle in what would become Gladwin County, arriving years before the lumber companies, the railroads, or the town of Gladwin itself.

He made his living the only way the place allowed: trapping and hunting. In his first three years that work brought in around $900 a year — real money then — and he added to it by cutting marsh hay, which sold for as much as $40 a ton to the logging crews that eventually filled the woods around him. The man who came to an empty river valley ended up feeding the boom that followed. He later served as a township supervisor and a judge of probate, and died in 1886 at eighty-four.

His name didn’t leave with him. Secord Township carries it, and so does Secord Lake — one of the big reservoirs on that same Tittabawassee he paddled up. A century and a half later, the route of his week-long canoe trip is lake-country highway, and the forks where he stopped are still on the map.