Ogemaw Springs: the town that lost the county seat by one vote

A nine-foot iron pipe stands in the woods near a township park east of West Branch, still pushing up cold artesian water the way it has for a century and a half. Locals call it the Big Flow. It is about all that’s left of Ogemaw Springs, the settlement that came within one vote of running the whole county.

Ogemaw Springs got there first. Lumbering in the county is usually dated to 1871, and this is where it began — sawmills going up around a natural spring that gave settlers their drinking water and gave the steam locomotives the water they needed to keep hauling pine. The railroad reached it in 1872. By 1873 the place had a couple hundred people, several mills, a grocery, and a post office. For a few years it looked like the obvious capital of a brand-new county.

Then came the 1876 vote for the county seat, and West Branch — a little bigger, a little better placed on the rail line — won it by a single ballot. One vote sent the courthouse, the lawyers, and the future down the road. The Panic of 1873 had already squeezed the timber trade, and as the big pines ran out in the 1890s, families simply packed up and moved the few miles to West Branch, where the work and the government now were.

What remains is quiet and a little haunting. The spring still feeds a small Ogemaw Township park, and the Big Flow still runs, though silt has slowed it from the gusher it once was. You can stand where a county capital might have been and hear nothing but water coming out of the ground, doing the one thing it has never stopped doing.