Marysville was Vicksburg until another Vicksburg got in the way

Marysville is named for a woman almost no record describes, and it landed on her name by accident. The St. Clair River settlement started as a working riverfront: a man named Edward Vickery set up at the foot of what’s now Huron Boulevard, called it Vickery’s Landing, and the little community that grew around the docks and mills came to be known as Vicksburg.

The trouble was that Michigan already had a Vicksburg, down near Kalamazoo, and a state can only have one post office by a given name. So in 1859 the river town had to pick something new. It chose Marysville, after Mary — the wife of Nelson Mills, who ran the sawmill that was the beating heart of the place. The mills here ate the white pine that floated down the river by the raft-load, and the family that owned the saws got to put a name on the map.

That quiet origin sits oddly next to what Marysville became in the next century. This is the town where C. Harold Wills — the engineer who helped Henry Ford design the Model T and is often credited with drawing the Ford script logo — built his own luxury car, the Wills Sainte Claire, in the 1920s, and laid out a planned company town around the plant. A Morton Salt works and a big Detroit Edison power plant followed. For a small city, Marysville packed in a lot of industry.

But strip all that back and you’re left with a sawmiller’s wife from before the Civil War. No grand founder, no famous battle — just a naming conflict with a town two hundred miles away, settled by reaching for the most familiar name in the room. Mary Mills never had to do anything but be married to the man with the mill, and a city of more than 9,000 still carries her first name.