Ubly: a name a clerk in Washington spelled wrong

Ubly is one of the few towns in Michigan whose name is, strictly speaking, a typo that nobody ever bothered to fix. The village in Bingham Township went through a couple of names first. Early on it was Sidon, a biblical name picked because it sat north of a settlement called Tyre, just as the old port of Sidon sat north of Tyre in scripture. Later it became Pagetts Corners, after Alfred Pagett, who put up a general store at the west end in 1870 — a store the Great Thumb Fire of 1881 burned to the ground.

The real name came out of a meeting. In 1880 a group of men gathered to apply for a post office, which a place needed to feel like a town. They wanted to call it Pagettville, but Pagett himself waved that off. He suggested instead the name of a little village back in England that he’d been fond of: Ubley. When the approved paperwork came back from Washington, whoever had copied it out had spelled it Ubly, no second e. Nobody sent it back. The misspelling became the town.

There’s a real Ubley in Somerset, England, to this day, tiny and tucked under the Mendip Hills — and its Michigan namesake has gone its own way for nearly a century and a half, dropped letter and all.

What grew here was farm country, like the rest of the Thumb. Ubly became a quiet crossroads serving the grain and sugar-beet fields around it, the kind of place better known now for its schools and its harvest than for the long-gone English hamlet that accidentally lent it a slightly wrong version of its name.