The Cheese Capital of Michigan

Pinconning calls itself the Cheese Capital of Michigan, and there’s a real story behind it. The town started as a lumber settlement in the 1870s — its name comes from a Chippewa word meaning roughly “place of potatoes.” Once the pine was logged off, the cleared land filled up with dairy farms, and by 1915 there was so much milk around that nobody knew what to do with it all.

A cheesemaker named Dan Horn, who’d learned his trade in Wisconsin, had the answer. He made his own version of Colby cheese — milder than cheddar, and handy in those days because it didn’t need to be kept as cold. He called it Pinconning cheese, and sold it from his grocery store right on US-23, the route Detroit-area hunters and anglers drove north. His daughter, Inez Wilson, took over the shop in 1939 — Wilson’s Cheese Shoppe, with a giant mouse on the roof, bills itself as Michigan’s oldest cheese store and is still in business in the same spot, now on M-13 (the old US-23), still selling the original recipe. You’ll find Pinconning cheese in stores all over the region.