Mundy Township is named for Michigan's first lieutenant governor

The first settlers reached the future Mundy Township in 1833, breaking ground on a few sections of land before there was a road worth the name. When the township was formally organized on March 11, 1837 — just months after Michigan became a state — it was named for Edward Mundy, who at that moment was the new state’s first lieutenant governor.

Mundy was an Ann Arbor lawyer, not a Genesee County man, and as far as the record shows he never lived on the land that carries his name. That was common enough in the 1830s. Townships getting organized all over the young state reached for the names of the officials and dignitaries of the day, and a sitting lieutenant governor was about as prominent as Michigan names came. So a stretch of farm country southwest of Flint ended up labeled for a statehouse figure most of its residents would never meet.

The township’s own little center had a plainer name. The crossroads settlement was first called Mundy Centre, and later Rankin, sitting just west of where U.S. 23 runs today along Grand Blanc Road. It never grew into a city the way some Genesee County communities did; Mundy stayed a township, and a largely rural one, even as Flint’s suburbs crept toward its edges.

It’s an easy thing to drive through without a second thought — Mundy Road, Mundy Township, the Mundy this and that. But the word goes back to a single Ann Arbor attorney who happened to hold the number-two job in Lansing during the months a new township needed a name, and got remembered for it across nearly two centuries of mailing addresses.