Grant: the onion capital that grew out of a drained marsh

The dirt east of Grant is so black and so rich it looks burnt, and that dirt is the whole story of the town. It’s muck — old marsh bottom, thousands of years of rotted plants packed into soil that grows root crops like nowhere else. Muck like this covers barely one percent of the planet’s land, mostly clustered around the Great Lakes, and Grant sits on a generous slab of it.

It wasn’t always farmland. There used to be a marsh here, around 3,500 acres of it near Rice Lake, good for nothing but hunting and fishing until a man named Kincaid bought most of it and drained it. What he uncovered underneath was that fertile black ground, and once people understood what they had, the marsh became some of the most productive vegetable land in Michigan. In 1935 Pete VanSingel bought a few acres of it and started growing carrots and onions, and families have been working that muck ever since.

Onions were the crop that made the name. By the 1930s, carload after carload of onions were rolling out of the Grant depot on the railroad, enough that the town started calling itself the Onion Capital of the World. Before that it had moved serious tonnage of peaches and produce too — a railroad station town that turned into a shipping point for whatever the surrounding country could grow.

Drive the back roads east of town in late summer and you’ll see it still going: low green fields of onion tops stretching flat to the tree line, and the smell of fresh-pulled onions hanging over a road named, somewhere down the line, for a marsh that isn’t there anymore.