Imlay is named for a Connecticut man who reportedly never set foot here

The man the township and city are named for was a land speculator from Hartford, Connecticut, who bought timberland here in the 1830s without, by most accounts, ever bothering to come look at it. When the township organized in 1850, it took the name of its absentee landlord: Imlay. William H. Imlay had money and an eye for cheap forest; the people who actually cleared and settled the place got his name on their post office for their trouble.

The town itself came later, and it came from the railroad. In 1870, an engineer named Charles Palmer — working for the Port Huron & Lake Michigan line — bought and surveyed about 240 acres and platted a village along the new tracks, meaning it to be a shipping point for produce. The trains made it. A depot meant farmers could load crops and merchants could pull in goods, and a real town gathered around the platform. Incorporation followed fast, in 1871, and the new village took the established name with the word “City” tacked on: Imlay City, distinguishing it from the rural township already wearing the name.

It’s a common enough Michigan pattern with a twist. Speculators bought huge tracts sight unseen and sometimes ended up with their names on the map purely because they held the paper. What’s a little pointed about Imlay is the gap between the namesake and the place — a Hartford investor immortalized on water towers and welcome signs of a Thumb farm town he is said never to have visited, while Palmer, the man who actually drew the streets, is the one most people have never heard of.

So the name on the sign honors the money, and the grid under your tires honors the railroad. The crops the trains were built to haul are still grown in the fields all around it.