Otisville is named for three brothers who bought 5,000 acres of pine

In the early 1830s the north edge of Genesee County was still mostly forest and Chippewa hunting ground. The trees were the reason anyone came. White pine stood thick across Thetford Township, and where there was pine, there was money for whoever could cut it, mill it, and ship it.

The town of Otisville is named for the family that did exactly that. Around 1851 a sawmill went up in the northeast corner of the township. The next year, three Otis brothers — with Francis taking the lead — bought out the existing lumber operation and the roughly 5,000 acres of timberland that came with it, and went into business for themselves. They did well enough that when the village needed a name, it took Francis Otis’s.

What turned the settlement into a real town was the railroad. A station appeared in Otisville in 1874 on the Flint River Railroad, and once the trains could haul logs and lumber straight out, the place had what Pine Run and a dozen other inland settlements never got. Otisville incorporated as a village in 1877, the same era the line was folded into the growing Pere Marquette system.

The pine was eventually all cut, the way it always was, and the lumber economy that built the town moved on north. But the railroad’s path outlived the railroad. In 2016 a local farmer bought up about ten miles of the old rail corridor through Thetford and turned it into the Southern Links Trailway, a route now walked and ridden between Otisville, Otter Lake, and Millington — the timber line reborn as a trail.