Luther: the town that was almost named Wilson

There was a moment in 1881 when the village of Luther was going to be called Wilsonville. A lumbering firm named Wilson, Luther & Wilson had set up a sawmill at the headwaters of the Little Manistee River. Two of the three partners were Wilson brothers, so the camp around the mill took their name. It made sense — until word came back from Lansing that Michigan already had a Wilson, and a town can’t share a name with an existing post office.

So they reached for the third partner. The town became Luther, after William A. Luther, the one firm member who wasn’t a Wilson. He got a village out of the naming rules; the Wilsons got a footnote. The original plat was recorded in March 1882, and Luther grew into a real logging town, big enough by its boom to carry its own newspaper, the Luther Observer.

The village ended up straddling a township line. The bulk of it sat in Newkirk Township, with a piece across the way once platted as Wilson’s Addition. So the Wilson name survived in the property records even after it lost the town. Around it the pine fell and the Little Manistee carried the logs, and like every camp on the river, Luther watched the timber that built it run out.

What’s unusual is that Luther didn’t vanish when the pine did. The same Little Manistee that floated the logs is now a trout stream, and the village that almost became Wilsonville hangs on as a stop for canoeists, anglers, and snowmobilers — its main drag still called State Street, its name still settling an argument from 1881.