McBain: a Dutch farm town with a Rambler streak

McBain is a small farming city in the southern part of the county, about ten miles below Lake City. It sits right on the line between Riverside and Richland townships. It started the way most towns up here did — as a sawmill settlement in the 1880s, first called Owens before it took the McBain name. When the pine was cut, the families who stayed turned to the soil. McBain has been a farm town ever since.

A lot of those families were Dutch. McBain and the nearby crossroads of Lucas were settled in good part by immigrants from the Netherlands. That heritage still runs deep in the area’s Christian schools, churches, and dairy farms. There’s a charming reminder of it in the schools’ nicknames. The McBain public school teams are the Ramblers, and the Christian school’s are the Comets. The names are said to trace back to the Dutch ships Wandelaar and Komeet (“rambler” and “comet”). Those ships carried some of the town’s founders across the Atlantic.

Today McBain is one of the smallest cities in Michigan — a tidy place of grain elevators, church steeples, and surrounding farmland. It’s the agricultural heart of Missaukee County.