Old Settlers: the Black homesteaders who made Mecosta home in 1860

In the years just before the Civil War, Black families began arriving in the woods around Mecosta — some coming up from Ohio as free people, others slipping north through Canada and the Underground Railroad. They came for land. The Homestead Act would soon hand 160 acres to anyone willing to clear and farm it, and out here a family could own ground in its own name, which was no small thing for people one generation removed from slavery. James Guy is remembered as the first, settling in Wheatland Township in 1861. Within a decade Black homesteaders held well over a thousand acres across Mecosta and the counties beside it.

They did the hard work of any frontier: felled timber, broke fields, built one-room schools and country churches, and married into the white and Native families around them. Their settlement did not fade the way so many rural Black communities did. It held.

In 1934, three of their sons — Arthur Cross, Emmett Porter, and Leslie Guy — decided the families ought to gather every year and remember where they came from. The first Old Settlers Reunion met that summer at School Section Lake, just outside Mecosta, and it has met there nearly every August since. On a good Saturday, as many as 600 descendants spread out across the lakeside park, trading names and tracing family lines back to the people who arrived in 1860.

That is the quiet astonishment of the thing. Most American towns can point to a founding family or two. This corner of Mecosta County can point to a whole community of formerly enslaved people who came north, took root, and whose great-great-grandchildren still pull into the same park every August to lay out lunch under the trees.