Rosebush, the town that couldn't settle on a name

A railroad man’s wife is the reason a small village north of Mount Pleasant is called Rosebush. The name didn’t come easy, though — this place went through a whole stack of them first.

It began in 1844, when Cornelius Bogan opened a general store and called the spot Halfway, for the simple reason that it sat about midway between Clare and Mount Pleasant. That was honest, if unromantic. Things got tangled when the Ann Arbor Railroad pushed through and a resident named James Bush, platting the land, traded the railroad a slice of his property for the right to name the depot after his wife, Rose. So the station became Rosebush.

The post office, meanwhile, had its own ideas. A separate addition platted in 1873 by Elias B. Calkins went on the books as Calkinsville, and that’s what the post office was called when it opened that July. Then the flip-flopping started: the office became Rosebush in 1889, swung back to Calkinsville in 1890, and finally landed on Rosebush for good on February 19, 1903 — matching the depot at last, after the better part of two decades of mismatched signs.

Today the village sits entirely within the boundaries of the Isabella Indian Reservation, homeland of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, in farm country threaded by the Ann Arbor’s old line. The trains are long gone and the depot with them, but the name a man bartered for his wife outlasted every committee that tried to change it.