Vassar, the Cork Pine City — named for a college founder who never lived here

When Townsend North and James Edmunds founded a sawmill town on the Cass River in 1849, they named it for Matthew Vassar — the Poughkeepsie brewer and philanthropist, kin to the founders, who would soon endow Vassar College. The famous women’s college and this Tuscola County river town share a namesake, which has amused visitors ever since.

The nickname is pure Michigan: the Cork Pine City. Cork pine was the lumberman’s term for the very finest old-growth white pine — trees 150 feet tall and three feet through, with wood so light and clear it floated high in the water “like cork” — and the Cass River valley grew some of the best of it anywhere. For decades Vassar’s mills turned that timber into the boards that built the Midwest, and the riverfront downtown, with its handsome brick blocks climbing from the Cass, is the lumber era’s gift to the present. The pines are long gone; the town they paid for is still here, and still proud of the name.