How Luce County got its name

Luce County is one of Michigan’s youngest counties. It was carved out of neighboring Chippewa and Mackinac counties in 1887, once enough people had settled the new railroad and lumber towns of the Tahquamenon Valley to support a county of their own, with Newberry as the seat.

The county was named for Cyrus G. Luce, who was serving as Michigan’s governor at the time. Luce was a farmer from the southern end of the state — he raised crops on eighty acres in Branch County before working his way up through local offices to the State Legislature and finally the governor’s chair. Naming a brand-new northern county after the sitting governor was a fitting honor, even though Luce had little connection to this remote stretch of the Upper Peninsula and never lived here.

To this day Luce County remains one of the least-populated counties in Michigan: a quiet expanse of forest, lake, and river where the towns are few and small and the wild country is vast.