Leslie is named for a family nobody in town ever met

Plenty of Michigan towns are named for their founders, their first postmaster, or some feature of the land. Leslie isn’t. The town in southern Ingham County carries the name of a family that, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot there.

When the township was being organized in the late 1830s, the job of naming it fell to Dr. J. A. Cornell, a state legislator from Spring Arbor over in Jackson County. Cornell proposed “Leslie” in honor of a much-respected family by that name he had known back in eastern New York. The name was adopted when the township was formally organized in the spring of 1838. So the place is a kind of long-distance tribute — a Michigan town wearing the name of New York neighbors who probably never knew the honor existed.

The people who actually built the place have their own names on the record, just not on the town. The township had first been part of neighboring Aurelius before splitting off as its own unit in late 1837. The first township meeting was held in April 1838 at the log home of Henry Fiske, who ran the gathering, and Benjamin Davis was elected the first supervisor. Before any of them arrived, surveyors like Joseph Wampler and John Mullett had walked the lines back in the 1820s, marking out the grid the settlers would follow.

It’s a small thing, but it says something about how these towns came to be. A legislator passing through could hand a brand-new community a name out of his own memory, and it stuck — so today there’s a town full of people in Ingham County answering to the name of a family from another state, two centuries gone, that none of them ever met.