Paw Paw is named for a fruit most people have never tasted

Say the name twice and it sounds like a joke, but the pawpaw is a real fruit and a genuinely strange one: a green, lumpy thing the size of a small mango, with custard-soft flesh that tastes somewhere between banana and ripe melon. It’s the largest fruit native to North America, and long before settlers arrived it grew in thick stands along the river running through this part of the county. The Indigenous people here named the river for the trees; the trees gave their name to the water, and the water gave its name to the town.

Paw Paw planted itself on that river in the 1830s, when a sawmill went up and a settlement gathered around it. When Van Buren County organized in 1837, Paw Paw was made the county seat — and it still is, which is why the courthouse, the county offices, and the lawyers’ shingles all cluster here rather than in any of the bigger towns nearby.

The fruit that gave the village its name mostly faded from everyday life. Pawpaws bruise easily and rot fast, so they never became a grocery-store crop, and for most of the last century the average resident had never eaten one. What replaced them in the local economy was a different vine entirely: grapes. The same warm, lake-tempered soil that once grew custard fruit turned out to be ideal for Concords and wine grapes, and Paw Paw became a grape town, home to St. Julian, the state’s oldest winery.

So the name is a small fossil. It records a fruit that used to define the riverbanks here and now barely shows up at the farmers’ market — a town still wearing the name of something it largely stopped growing, parked on a river that still carries it too.