The town named for a word carved on a shanty log

Marlette is named after people who left. The story goes that two brothers came down from Ontario in the 1850s meaning to build a mill and start a village in the timber. Before they did much of anything, they put up a log shanty across from a settler’s farm and carved a name into the end log: Marlatt, their mother’s family name. Then their plans fell apart and they went back to Canada, leaving the shanty and the carving behind.

The name outlasted them. When it came time to organize the township in 1859 — carved out of pieces of Sanilac and Buel townships — a neighbor named William Rudd suggested they take the word off that old log. Somewhere in the writing-down, “Marlatt” softened into “Marlette,” and that’s the spelling that stuck on the map. The brothers who’d carved it never came back to see a whole town wearing a tidied-up version of their family name.

The settlers who did stay had come for the same two things: tall timber and good dirt. The lumber went first, the way it always did in the Thumb, and what was left was some of the most workable farmland in the region — which is how Marlette ended up calling itself the Heart of the Thumb, sitting square in the middle of the four-county hand. The town earned its railroad in 1881 the hard way, with locals raising fifteen thousand dollars to bring the Port Huron & Northwestern in, and it grew into a real farm-service town. But the origin stays the charming part: a place that took its identity from a piece of graffiti left by two men who decided Michigan wasn’t for them.