Litchfield got its name over a few drinks in Detroit

Litchfield was supposed to be called Columbus. The 1879 county history blames the change on a man named Henry Stevens, described there as “a turbulent man,” who wanted the town named for Litchfield, Connecticut, where a lot of the early settlers came from. So he rode to Detroit, where the Michigan Legislature was in session, and — in the dry words of that history — by “free use of liquid and other arguments” talked the lawmakers into adopting Litchfield instead. Translation: he bought them drinks until they agreed.

The settling came first. Henry Stevens had arrived in 1834, and the village was platted in 1836 by Hervey Smith and his son David, who naturally wanted it called Smithville after themselves. The post office, opened in 1837, got the name Columbus. Stevens overruled all of it from a barroom in Detroit. The place incorporated as a village in 1877 and finally became a city in 1970.

There’s a quieter monument to the town’s roots that’s still running. In 1880 Frederick W. Stock — the Hillsdale flour man whose mills shaped that city — built a grain mill in Litchfield, and his son August oversaw the work. That mill never quit. It operates today as the Litchfield Grain Company, well over a century of continuous milling on the same spot.

So Litchfield carries two kinds of history at once: a Connecticut name argued into existence over whiskey, and a working mill that has outlasted nearly everyone who ever spelled the name either way.