Grant: a town that borrowed a Civil War general's name from a railroad sign

In 1882, with Michigan’s logging boom in its last good years, a man named Andrew J. Squier put up the first sawmill on this patch of southern Newaygo County, about five miles below the town of Newaygo. That’s the whole reason Grant exists: there was timber, and Squier built a place to cut it.

The railroad followed the mill, the way it usually did. The Chicago and West Michigan line — later folded into the Pere Marquette — ran its tracks through, and a depot went up beside them labeled Grant Station, after Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general turned president. The settlement that pooled around the mill and the depot simply took the sign’s name. By 1893 it was an incorporated village. Grant himself, as far as anyone can tell, never came anywhere near the place.

It’s a tidy little time capsule of how the late 1800s named the map. All over Michigan, towns that sprang up in those decades grabbed the presidents and generals their grandparents were proud of, and Grant is about as clean an example as you’ll find — a place that exists because a sawmill and a set of rails happened to cross here, wearing the borrowed name of a national hero.

You can still read that chapter off the downtown. The old railroad-era depot survives, and so does a wooden water tower from the days when the steam engines needed somewhere to drink. Both are leftovers from the one event that put the town on the map: the day the tracks arrived.