Hersey: the county's first seat, platted dry by a lumber baron

When Delos Blodgett platted the village of Hersey on July 9, 1867, the only building standing was an old water-powered sawmill. Within a single season the lumber baron — everybody called him “Dock” — had put up a three-story hotel, a two-story store, and a row of other buildings, and a town existed where there had been forest. Two winters later, when Osceola County organized in 1869, Hersey was named its first county seat.

Blodgett built it on a smart piece of ground: the village sits right where the Hersey River empties into the Muskegon, and that meeting of waters gave him the power to run a sawmill and, before long, a large flour mill. Logs came down to be cut; flour went out by the barrel. For a stretch in the 1870s, Hersey was the busiest settlement in the county.

The detail that says the most about its founder is buried in the paperwork. Blodgett wrote a temperance clause into the deeds — a permanent ban on selling liquor that traveled with the land from one owner to the next. He didn’t just build a town; he tried to keep it dry in perpetuity, one property line at a time.

Hersey’s moment at the top didn’t last. The county seat moved to Reed City as the railroads reshaped which towns mattered, and when the pine ran out, the population thinned the way it did everywhere up here. What’s left is a quiet village at a river junction with an outsized claim: it was here first, and it was here on purpose, dry deeds and all.