Three missionaries, a crooked creek, and the start of Sebewaing

On July 1, 1845, three young Lutheran missionaries — Johann Auch, Simon Dumser, and George Sinke — arrived on the shore of Saginaw Bay where a crooked creek met the water. Their leader, Friedrich Schmid, had sent them out from Ann Arbor to live among the Chippewa here, and they got to work fast: a log chapel went up that same summer. The place already had a name. Sebewaing comes from an Ojibwe word for the river, and the village that grew up later simply kept it.

The mission’s reach pushed out across the water, too. In 1849 Auch ferried lumber up from lower Saginaw to a Chippewa settlement on Wild Fowl Bay, a few miles north, and a mission house was raised and dedicated there that June. It is a sturdy little building, and it has outlasted nearly everything around it.

The mission’s success was also its ending. The Chippewa it served had mostly left the area by the mid-1850s as treaties and settlement pushed them elsewhere, and the work that brought the missionaries here wound down. The mission house was sold off. But it was not torn down — and a century later it was moved into Sebewaing and set up as a museum, where it is cared for to this day as a piece of how this corner of the Thumb began.

That old frame building is a quietly remarkable survivor. Before the sugar factory, before the railroad, before the festival and the harbor, three men came to the mouth of a crooked creek — and the house they helped build is still standing, a few blocks from a downtown that owes its very name to the river they came up.