LeRoy grew up shipping tan bark and potatoes by the railcar

Before LeRoy had a name, the railroad just called it “end of twenty.” When the Grand Rapids & Indiana pushed its line north through Osceola County, the spot sat twenty miles up the track from the Paris terminal, so that’s what the crews wrote on it. The first train reached town in late 1871, merchants set up beside the rails that same summer, and James Bevins took charge of the new post office — his name still rides on Bevins Street. The village took its proper name, by most accounts, from the chief of a Native American band who had lived in the area before the surveyors arrived, and it incorporated in February 1873.

For a few decades the platform was the whole point. LeRoy sat in the middle of country thick with hemlock and white pine, and the town turned itself into a loading dock. Grain, potatoes, and cordwood went out by the railcar — and so did tan bark, the rough outer bark stripped from hemlock trees and hauled to tanneries, where its tannin turned cowhide into leather. Tan bark is a forgotten cash crop now, but for a while it paid as well as the lumber did, and crews peeled hemlocks across the township to feed the trains.

The pine and hemlock eventually ran out, the way they did everywhere up here, and LeRoy settled into being a quiet farm village instead of a shipping boomtown. The old Grand Rapids & Indiana grade didn’t disappear, though. It’s part of the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail now — the long paved rail-trail between the Grand Rapids area and Cadillac — so the same straight line that once carried bark and potatoes out of town now carries cyclists right through it.

Rose Lake, the biggest lake in the county, sits just west of the village, which is why a lot of people who pass through LeRoy today are towing a boat rather than waiting on a freight train.