Marne used to be Berlin — until a 1918 battle changed its name

For most of its life this little Wright Township crossroads was named Berlin. German families had settled the area in the mid-1800s, the post office opened as Berlin in 1852, and the name fit the people who lived there. It was an ordinary West Michigan farm village with a German name and nobody thought twice about it.

Then came the First World War, and suddenly a German name was a problem. Across the country, towns and families with German names found themselves under suspicion — sauerkraut got rebranded as “liberty cabbage,” and places called Berlin or Germania started looking for something else to be called. In 1918 and 1919, American troops helped turn back the last great German offensive of the war at the Second Battle of the Marne, a river in France. When the village went looking for a new name, it reached for that battlefield. Berlin became Marne, in honor of the soldiers who fought there.

But the old name never fully left. It hid in plain sight, the way these things do — in the Berlin Fairgrounds, the Berlin Fair, a Baptist church. The neighbors just kept saying it out of habit, decades after the maps changed.

The loudest survival is a racetrack. Berlin Raceway opened on the fairgrounds in the early 1950s, a dirt oval that got paved in 1966, and on summer Saturday nights it still roars with stock cars under the lights. The town is Marne, officially and on every road sign. But the track kept the name the war took away, so the engines out on Berlin Fair Drive are still, in a small stubborn way, racing for Berlin.