Keego Harbor is named after a fish — by way of a poem

The name comes from a fish, and the fish comes from a poem. “Keego” is a spelling of an Ojibwe word meaning fish. It landed on this town because a Pontiac lawyer and land speculator named Joseph E. Sawyer pulled it straight out of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” — the long 1855 poem that taught a century of Americans their secondhand version of Native words.

Sawyer had a developer’s eye for Cass Lake, the big, deep lake on the west side of Oakland County. It had drawn wealthy Detroiters out for summers since the early 1800s. Around 1900 he bought and platted land between Cass Lake and Orchard Lake, and dug a canal to tie little Dollar Lake into the chain. Then he called the strip of shoreline a “harbor” on the east edge of Cass Lake, and gave it that borrowed, poetic word for fish. Keego Harbor was born more as a sales pitch than a town.

The pitch worked. The lakes filled with cottages and then year-round homes. On March 25, 1955, Governor G. Mennen Williams signed the charter that made the lakeside plat an official city. At well under a square mile, Keego Harbor is one of the smallest cities in the county, boxed in by water and bigger neighbors on every side.

Lay it out and it’s a strange little chain of borrowings: a real Ojibwe word, filtered through a poet from Massachusetts who never set foot here, picked up by a man selling lake lots, and finally bolted to a city that mostly forgot the fish it was named for.