Maple Rapids got rich on pine, not maple

The name promises maple syrup. The fortune came from pine. Maple Rapids, up in the northwest corner of Clinton County, took its name from the fast water on the Maple River — but the money that built the town flowed out of the sawmill, not the sugarbush.

The story starts early, in 1826, when George Campau set up a trading post on the river here, making this one of the first white settlements in what would become Clinton County. The Campau name should ring a bell: George’s brother Louis Campau is the man who founded Grand Rapids a few years later, downriver on a much bigger set of rapids. The brothers had a knack for picking spots where the water moved. George bought up the land around his post in the early 1830s, and Louis took the southern half in 1835 — the deal the village still counts as its real beginning.

For all the maple in the name, the river’s rapids were the point: moving water meant power. In 1852 William Hewitt arrived, bought 240 acres, threw a dam across the river, and put up a sawmill, a store, and a hotel. That dam is what made the town. Michigan’s great lumber boom was roaring, and Maple Rapids spent the back half of the 1800s turning logs into boards, growing fast enough to incorporate as a village in 1881.

Long before any of that, the river flats had another use entirely. Bands of Ottawa came through to boil maple sap into sugar each spring — the genuine maple the place is named for, tapped generations before a Campau ever pitched a trading post. The pine got cut and shipped, the boom faded, and the town settled into the quiet farm village it is now. But the river still rushes over the same rapids, and the maples still run sweet every March, indifferent to which one made anybody money.