Greenbush started as a fishery, then a homesick man renamed it

Before it shipped a single board of pine, Greenbush smelled of fish and oak barrels. Crozier Davison came up from Detroit in 1848 and set up a fishery and a cooperage right on the Lake Huron shore — netting whitefish, building docks, and hammering together the barrels to pack the catch in. He was here a full generation before the lumber companies noticed the place.

When they did, the shoreline became a shipping point. New York money bought up government timberland in the early 1860s, and the spot picked up the workaday name McDougal’s Landing for the operation that worked it. William Conklin arrived from New York around 1867 and built the area’s first sawmill, and schooners began carrying Alcona pine out across the lake from this stretch of coast.

The name Greenbush came from homesickness, not geography. The story the township still tells is of a young man on the crew who pined for Greenbush in Rensselaer County, New York, where he’d grown up — so to ease the ache, the men around him renamed the place after his hometown. A post office under the name Greenbush opened in 1870, and the borrowed name stuck for good.

Greenbush never incorporated into a village; it stayed an unincorporated community strung along US-23, one of the three original townships from when Alcona organized as a county. The mills closed and the schooners stopped coming, and the lumber-port bustle faded into the quiet beach town it is now — but the name, carried across a thousand miles by one homesick logger, is still on the road sign.