Oak Grove: a grist-mill village that almost wasn't called that

A few miles north of Howell, where the farm roads cross in Cohoctah Township, there’s a cluster of old houses that locals will tell you makes Mayberry look like Las Vegas. This is Oak Grove, and it’s the kind of place that was busier in 1870 than it is now. The village grew up around water and grain: in 1846 settlers threw a dam across Bo-bish-e-nung Creek — these days everyone calls it Bogue Creek — and built a grist mill where the water pooled into a mill pond. Where there’s a mill, a store and a post office follow, and they did.

The village nearly carried a different name. A settler from New York wanted to call it Chemungville, after one of the counties back home. But the post office that moved into town went by Oak Grove, and a post office name has a way of winning. Chemungville quietly faded, the village accepted “Oak Grove,” and that was that.

The township around it couldn’t make up its mind either. It started life as Tuscola, then became Bristol, and only later settled into Cohoctah — a string of name changes packed into the county’s early decades, the kind of thing that happened when a place was still figuring out what it was.

The mill is long gone, the store closed, and the Oak Grove post office finally shut its doors for good in 1982, ending well over a century of mail. What’s left is the shape of a nineteenth-century crossroads village, frozen — a handful of homes near where the dam once held back the creek, in a township that the rest of the county mostly drives past on the way to somewhere else.