Inkster's name came off a red sawmill — and its post office was once 'Moulin Rouge'

A man from a fishing island in the North Sea gave this Wayne County city its name. Robert Inkster was born in 1828 in Lerwick, in Scotland’s Shetland Islands, and by the mid-1850s he was running a steam-powered sawmill near the crossing of what’s now Inkster Road and Michigan Avenue. The mill cut ties and fuel for the railroad pushing west out of Detroit, and the little settlement that grew up around it took the millman’s name.

The mill was painted red, and that color stuck harder than you’d think. When a post office opened here in the 1850s, it carried the name Moulin Rouge — French for “red mill” — a nod to the building everybody used as a landmark. For years your mail to this part of the county was postmarked with the same two words as a Paris cabaret. The post office was eventually renamed Inkster, and the city kept it.

There’s a deeper layer to the name, too. “Inkster” traces back through Robert’s Shetland family to an old Norse place-name, roughly a person’s name joined to the word for a summer pasture — a thousand-year-old word for a far-northern grazing field, carried by a sawyer to a railroad town in Michigan.

Today Inkster is a working-class suburb wedged among Dearborn Heights, Westland, and Garden City, better known to many for its civil-rights history and its proud Black community than for the mill that named it. But the road still runs straight through the middle of town under the old name, and every time someone reads “Inkster Road” off a green sign, they’re reading the name of a red mill that hasn’t turned a blade in more than a century.