The Polly Ann Trail: a railroad that locals couldn't stop nicknaming

The trail is named after a railroad that nobody could pronounce. The line was the Pontiac, Oxford & Northern — the “PO&N” — and somewhere along the way the initials slurred into a woman’s name, “Polly Ann,” and the nickname stuck so hard it outlived the trains themselves. When the rails came up, the path that replaced them kept it.

It runs about 20 miles through Lapeer County, north out of Oakland County on that same dead-flat, dead-straight grade a railroad needs. That’s the gift of a rail trail: a freight line never climbed a hill if it could help it, so the walking and biking are easy the whole way. The state owns the corridor; a local trail group keeps it up.

The path threads through the village of Dryden and on into Imlay City, where the main trailhead sits on a street called P.O. & N. — the railroad’s initials again, still on the street sign a century later. From there it pushes north toward North Branch.

The surface tells you which century you’re standing in. Some stretches have been smoothed and packed into a tidy crushed-stone path; others still ride on the coarse gravel ballast the railroad laid down to hold the ties, so a road bike that loves the polished sections will rattle on the rough ones. Nothing with a motor is allowed — no cars, no trucks, no ORVs — which is part of why it stays quiet enough to hear birds in the brush along the old line.

It’s free, it’s open, and it stitches several Lapeer towns together end to end. Pack a bike or just walk it, and you’re traveling the exact ground a steam train rolled over, on a corridor a community decided to keep instead of pave over.