Rapid City spent six years deciding what to call itself

Some towns get a name and keep it. Rapid City took three tries and six years. When the post office first opened here in 1892, in the northwest corner of Kalkaska County, it was called Van Buren. Three years later, in 1895, somebody tightened the spelling to a single word — Vanburen — for reasons lost to time. Then in 1898 the residents put their foot down and changed it for good to Rapid City, after the Rapid River that runs right through town.

You can understand why they wanted the river’s name on the sign. The Rapid is the defining thing here — a fast, cold, clean stream tumbling down toward the Chain of Lakes, and the reason the settlement existed at all. The Van Buren name, borrowed from the old president, meant nothing to the place; the river meant everything. So the town traded a borrowed name for one that actually described where it stood, sitting in Clearwater Township a few miles from the south end of Torch Lake.

That instinct — name yourself for the water — runs all through this corner of Michigan, where the rivers and lakes were the highways, the millpower, and the reason anyone settled in the first place. Rapid City is small now, the kind of place you’d roll through without slowing down. But its name is a little fossil of a decision the residents made in 1898: that a town ought to be called after the living thing it grew up beside, not after a politician from somewhere else.