Spring Lake was Mill Point first, named for its 25 sawmills

The pretty name came late. The village that everyone now knows as Spring Lake started life as Mill Point, and the name was a flat description of what the place did: cut wood. Col. Amos Norton settled the area in 1837 and put up a sawmill on the north bank of the Grand River, and Captain Benjamin Hopkins arrived the same year to build a mill of his own on the lake. The settlement around them incorporated as the Village of Mill Point in 1849.

At its peak the lumber business ran flat out. Something like 25 sawmills crowded the shore near Mill Point, screaming through the white pine that floated down the Grand and feeding the lake schooners that hauled the lumber off to build Chicago and Milwaukee. Brickyards and fruit orchards filled in around the mills, and later the Spring Lake Clinker Boat Company turned out wooden boats on the same water.

By 1869 the timber rush was fading and the village wanted a name that pointed somewhere besides the sawdust. On May 28 of that year, Mill Point officially became the Village of Spring Lake, taking the name of the long, narrow lake just north of the river that the town wraps around. The Spring Lake House mineral-spring resort opened a few years later, and the place pivoted from sawmills to summer visitors.

The lumber money is mostly invisible now, paved over and grown back to neighborhoods. But the lake is still there, and so is the older identity if you know where to look — Mill Point lives on as the name of the village’s elementary school, a quiet receipt for the 25 mills that started it all.