How Montmorency County got its name

Montmorency is an unusual name for a stretch of northern Michigan woods, and the story behind it has a twist. When the state first drew this county on the map in 1840, it was called Cheonoquet County, after an Ojibwe chief whose name meant “Big Cloud” and who had signed several early treaties with the United States. A few years later, in 1843, the legislature swapped the name for “Montmorency” — borrowed from a noble French-Canadian family — and the chief’s name was quietly dropped.

The county itself didn’t really come to life until the 1880s, when it split off from Alpena County and lumber companies arrived to cut its enormous stands of white pine. The timber was floated down the rivers and hauled out by rail, and for a few decades the woods rang with axes and saws. Then the big pine ran out, the boom faded, and much of the cutover land eventually passed to the state. Those once-stripped forests grew back into the Mackinaw State Forest — the wild, lightly settled country that covers much of the county today, elk and all.

For anyone moving here, that history is the reason Montmorency feels the way it does: thousands of acres of public forest, a handful of small towns, and — famously — not a single traffic light in the whole county.