How Montmorency County got its name

Montmorency is an unusual name for a stretch of northern Michigan woods. The story behind it has a twist. The state first drew this county on the map in 1840. Back then it was called Cheonoquet County. That was after an Ojibwe chief whose name meant “Big Cloud.” He had signed several early treaties with the United States. A few years later, in 1843, the legislature swapped the name for “Montmorency.” That one was 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. That was when it split off from Alpena County. Lumber companies arrived to cut its enormous stands of white pine. The timber was floated down the rivers and hauled out by rail. For a few decades the woods rang with axes and saws. Then the big pine ran out. The boom faded. Much of the cutover land eventually passed to the state. Those once-stripped forests grew back into the Mackinaw State Forest. It is wild, lightly settled country. It covers much of the county today, elk and all.

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