Sheridan, named for a cavalry general

Sheridan carries the name of a Civil War general who never set foot in it. Philip Sheridan was the Union’s hard-charging cavalry commander, the man who rode through the Shenandoah Valley and helped corner Lee at Appomattox. When this Montcalm County settlement, founded in 1866, incorporated as a village in 1877, it took his name — fresh in everyone’s memory from a war barely a decade past.

What actually built the town was timber. The land around Sheridan held what people of the day called some of the richest stands of pine in the state, and a web of lakes and streams gave the loggers a way to float the cut to the mills. For a few decades the place ran hot. Main Street filled with storefronts, and the village supported real industry — a furniture factory and, of a later era, a spark plug plant, the kind of small specialized maker that kept a country town working after the pine was gone.

The pine did run out, the way it always did in Michigan, and Sheridan settled into the smaller life it lives now — around 650 people, roughly half what it was at its peak. But the town kept one stubborn point of pride: its water tower. The old one was so much a part of the skyline, so tied to how people pictured the place, that when it finally had to come down, the village had a replica of it painted onto the new tank. Most towns let a water tower be a water tower. Sheridan looked at its replacement and decided it should still look like the one everyone remembered.