The man who built Morrice wanted to name it after himself

When Isaac Gale laid out the village in 1876, he had a name in mind: Galesboro. Gale was vice-president of the Chicago & Port Huron Railroad, the man in charge of deciding where the depots went between Lansing and Flint, and he’d just put one of them here. Naming the place after himself seemed only fair. But the State of Michigan turned him down — there was already a Galesburg over in Kalamazoo County, close enough to cause trouble in the mail. So Gale picked his second choice and named the village for a friend: William Morrice, a Scottish immigrant who’d farmed 160 acres nearby since the late 1830s.

The friend got a town; the railroad man got a depot named after somebody else. It’s a small revenge that the place still answers to the farmer.

Morrice grew up Scottish. The settlers who came in the 1830s and ’40s were mostly Scots, sober and Presbyterian — in 1839 they organized a church on a pledge to abstain from liquor. The little farm settlement might have stayed a few cabins forever, but the railroad changed the math. Once the Grand Trunk’s main line ran straight through, Morrice had something its older neighbors didn’t: a reason for trains to stop. It incorporated as a village in 1884 and peaked around 600 people in the 1910s.

For a while you could even ride an electric interurban out of town — the Michigan United Traction line came through in 1911 — before the automobile killed it off by the end of the 1920s. The depot’s heyday is gone now, but the village kept the name it never quite asked for. Drive the Grand Trunk’s old route southwest from Durand and you’ll roll right through Morrice, named for a quiet Scottish farmer over the objections of the railroad boss who actually built it.