How Baldwin stole the county seat

Baldwin has been the seat of Lake County for well over a century, but it didn’t get the job the easy way. In the county’s early days, the county’s offices and records sat in the little settlement of Chase, over on the eastern side of the county. Baldwin, down at the crossing of two railroads, thought it made a better capital, and the two towns feuded over the honor.

As the story is told around here, the folks in Baldwin settled the matter in 1875 by simply taking what they wanted: a group of them slipped into the county office at Chase, carried off the county records, and brought them back to Baldwin. With the paperwork in hand, the deal was effectively done, and Baldwin has kept the county seat ever since.

It sounds outrageous today, but quietly “moving” the county records was a surprisingly common way to settle a county-seat fight in nineteenth-century Michigan. Chase, for its part, settled back into a quiet life along the headwaters of the Pere Marquette, where its township hall still stands today.