The little town that steered the world

Onaway doesn’t look like much today — a quiet town of fewer than a thousand people at the crossroads of M-68 and M-33 — but a century ago it was one of the busiest places in northern Michigan. A lumberman named Merritt Chandler platted the town in 1886, and by 1903 it had about 3,000 residents, the most of any town in the county.

Onaway’s claim to fame came from wood. With endless hardwood forests nearby, a factory here grew into the world’s largest maker of wooden steering wheels, turning out rims for the new automobiles rolling off Detroit’s lines. The town’s proud slogan was “Onaway Steers the World.” Then, on a January morning in 1926, fire tore through the factory and took the lives of four workers. The company rebuilt elsewhere, and the industry never came back to Onaway. You can still walk among the old factory ruins in Awakon Park, now a sculpture garden, where a thirty-foot steel steering wheel stands as a tribute to that era.

There’s one more landmark from the boom years: the grand 1908 courthouse Chandler built downtown, hoping to pull the county seat away from Rogers City. The seat stayed put, but the beautiful old building still stands and now holds the library and the local museum. Today Onaway is a small, friendly town that calls itself the Sturgeon Capital of Michigan, and it makes a quiet, affordable home base near Black Lake and the inland lakes.