How Hopkins got its name out of a hat

When the settlers of this stretch of northeastern Allegan County couldn’t agree on what to call the place, they did the democratic thing: nine men each wrote a name on a slip of paper, dropped the slips in a hat, and drew one out. The slip that won said “Hopkins.” That’s how the township got its name — not from a founder or a railroad man, but from the luck of the draw.

The name on that slip honored a child. Hopkins was for Oziel Hopkins Round, the young son of one of the pioneer families — and, sadly, the first settler to die in the new territory. So the town carries a little boy’s name forward, set in place by chance on a folded piece of paper.

The Rounds were the first family in. Jonathan Olin Round built the first log cabin here in 1837, in a spot they called Hopkinsburg, and brought his family out the next year. They were settling raw forest; the nearest real towns were a hard wagon ride away. Hopkinsburg was a busy little settlement at first, but then the railroad came through nearby and pulled the activity in its direction — a common fate for early Michigan villages, which lived or died by whether the tracks decided to favor them. The township itself was formally organized in 1852.

People sometimes assume the name honors Stephen Hopkins, the Rhode Islander who signed the Declaration of Independence, and there is a family connection floating around in the old accounts. But the story the town keeps is the better one: a hat, nine slips of paper, and a name pulled almost at random that happened to belong to a child the community had just buried. More than 170 years later, every road sign and grain elevator in town still carries the result of that small-town coin flip.