Fenton was named on a hand of cards

The town was almost called LeRoy. The story Fenton tells on itself is that two early settlers, William M. Fenton and Robert LeRoy, sat down to a card game on a August day in 1837 and played for the right to name the place. Fenton won. LeRoy got the consolation prize — the main street through downtown still carries his name, so every address on LeRoy Street is a small monument to a lost hand of cards.

Before any of that, the settlement went by Dibbleville, after Clark Dibble, who’d come through the wilderness in 1834, been struck by the lay of the land, and stayed to bring families in. Fenton and a partner bought Dibble’s mill and water rights a few years later, and once the new owners had the run of the place, the name was theirs to wager.

How literally to take the poker game is a fair question — some accounts hedge, and the records are thin, the way they often are for a frontier village’s tall tales. But the bones hold up: Fenton and LeRoy were real men, the name did change from Dibbleville, and LeRoy Street really does run through the heart of town. William Fenton went on to bigger things, serving as Michigan’s lieutenant governor from 1848 to 1852.

The village of Fenton was incorporated in 1863 and became a city a century later, in 1964. The downtown grew up around the millpond and the old depot, and it has held onto its brick storefronts. Walk down LeRoy Street on a summer evening and you’re walking the loser’s prize — the street a man got to keep, the story goes, because the cards went the other way.